Chapter 7. Image optimization
This chapter covers
- The importance of image optimization
- Online and command line image optimization tools
- Automatic data URIs
As the old saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Most websites today rely heavily on images to enhance their visual look and feel, so it isn’t surprising to learn that images often make up the bulk of a web page. Every byte counts in performance optimization and it’s important to optimize these images as much as possible.
In this chapter you’re going to learn about techniques you can apply to your website’s images that will reduce their file size and reduce the overall weight of your web pages. Modern image optimization techniques are proven to reduce image size by stripping unnecessary data from the file, thus reducing the file size without affecting image quality. The images on your website will look exactly the same but will be significantly lighter and quicker to download. You will learn how to use online and command line image optimization tools that will make a big difference to the size of your web pages. In this chapter, you will also discover data URIs and how they can be used with images in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests that a web page makes.