We changed three letters on our site. It made it 30% faster.

Website speed is a major aspect in website creation, but it's something everyone tends to overlook now and then. Optimizing your website for the best speed is difficult especially when you don't know where to start. How about changing three letters?

Images in your website can heavily affect how fast your website loads, so it's something everyone should pay attention to. One way to optimize images is to compress them. By making the images smaller in size, you can save bandwidth but at the cost of image quality.

So how do you make images smaller without compromising quality? We can look to other image file formats. Other image file formats can be are smaller than the most common ones, so let's look at some of them.

What are the most common file formats we use?

1. JPEG or JPG

JPEG or JPG is a popular image file format most known for it's lossy compression. Lossy Compression is when a file can lose some parts of it's information that's "unimportant". In simple words, Lossy Compression removes parts of the image it doesn't need, while keeping the quality. JPEG's Lossy Compression can be adjusted, unlike PNG's Lossy Compression.

2. PNG

PNG or Portable Network Graphics is another popular image format also used for Lossy Compression. PNG is an improved version of GIF. If you didn't know, PNG can also stand for "PNG's not GIF".

3. GIF

GIF or Graphics Interchange Format is another file format mainly used for it's ability to show animations online. Each file can support up to 8 bits per pixel and can contain 256 indexed colours.

We've covered the top three file formats that's commonly found online. Now we've covered that, what's the best format to use?

WebP or Web Picture is an image file format developed by Google that provides superior Lossy Compression. When you use WebP, you can create images that make the internet faster. WebP images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNG's and 25%-34% smaller than JPEG images according to Google's WebP article.

WebP is highly supported on most modern browsers and devices, so you won't have to worry about compatibility and support. WebP was developed in 2010, and is still growing up to this day. Most DIY website builders also support WebP, and it's recommended you switch to WebP for faster performance for your website.

Don't want to worry about this? Let Likha Studios help you with your website journey. Learn more at our site by clicking here.