Is your website slow? Could it be your images?

I recently noticed a prominent local website (to remain unnamed) was loading very slowly on my computer. Particularly one image - it was crawling across the screen, reminding me of the days of dial up modems. I could almost hear the screeching modem sound.

So I created this tutorial to share with the organization. It turns out they had some turnover in their communications department, and the new folks were able to upload to the website, but weren't familiar with preparing the images before uploading. With today's high speed Internet connections, it's easy to upload a bloated file - and it's not horrible to download a bloated file. But when there are many images on a page and nearly 40% of viewers abandoning websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load... then it becomes very important to get the image size right.

The good news is that resizing photos is quick and easy with Photoshop or Gimp. Just check out the video above.