Everyone, I repeat – Everyone, should be concerned with the speed in which their website and blog posts take to load. The speed in which your site loads will impact your SEO rankings, as well as if people stick around and wait for your website to load – or if they decide to go to your competitor’s site because it doesn’t take as long to load.
Some factors that make a difference with that are:

• Your hosting
• Your website design and structure
• And the number and size of the photos you’re posting

A good hosting company and a good designer can help with the first two (I recommend Flaunt Your Site for both of course 😉 ). But there is a fairly new piece of software that I’m sure will be part of your workflow soon.

JPEG Mini is this new program that you should all be clamoring to get your hands on. And I have no affiliation with this company (yet). In fact, I saw the technology when it was just a web service and thought it had a lot of promise, and thanks to John Patrick from San Luis Obispo, I discovered that they now have desktop applications for Mac and Windows that will batch your photos.

As a test, I took the photos from this wedding blog post I did recently.

I originally exported the photos from Lightroom at 1000 pixels wide at 80% JPEG Quality. There were 36 photos and at that size they came out to 8 Megabytes.

Then I used JPEG Mini to run all the photos in a batch, and I eliminated 2.82 Mbs. That is over 25%!!! That means that that blog post could load in 3/4 of the time.

A Couple Examples

The first photo was originally exported at a size of 230KB, and the JPEGMini version ended up at 159KB which is a 31% reduction.

This second photo originally weighed in at 360KB and ended up at 290KB with JPEGMini.

If you look closely, these photos are virtually identical. The second photo in each series is the JPEGMini version, but I bet you would be hard pressed to tell the difference. My suggestion is that you hurry right out and buy it. For $20 it’s a steal for the improvement it will provide to your website visitor’s experience. And again, I have no affiliation to this product, I’m not making any money for recommending it. In fact I just spent $20 for it, and I think everyone should have it too.