One of the essential features of an efficient website design is its ability to load onto to the browser quickly and without making the visitors wait. And for this, the website needs to be light enough. This is because slow loading websites are a result of heavy web pages.

When you use any file on your website, it can increase the response time significantly and at the same time also increase the amount of bandwidth used by the website. Reducing bandwidth is very beneficial for web users with capped broadband or those who have slow connections. Also, if your hosting provider has a limit on you, then you can benefit greatly by reducing the file size of images on your website. This would particularly help in times when you have a sudden increase in website hits.

Here are some tips to reduce the file size of images:

Resize the Images

The size of the images used on your website can vary manifolds. They can be huge if taken through cameras (for example, about 3000x2000 pixels) or smaller if it is a thumbnail (about 100x100) and probably a larger preview (600x400) before you link it to the original file.
In fact, you can consider using a drupal album module. That would allow you to make efficient use of the images without adding on to the weight. The web user will only be served photo images that are relevant at that time although all the images will be held on the server. This would evade the need to furnish large sized images to the users and they will be able to make decisions about the value of the image content more wisely.

Choose the Right File Type

There are 3 major file types that you can save your images as, namely .GIF, JPEG and PNG. Each of them have their share of benefits and serve to compress images in different ways. If you face problems with any one type of the file format, you can consider using the another.

GIF
This offers a palette of 256 colors and supports transparency. This particular file format is supported by all major browsers and is best used for logos and icons that demand a limited use of colors and texts.

JPEG
This format offers millions of colors but however, is not recommended for text or high contrast patterns. This is ideal for photographs that demand an extensive range of merging color combinations.
With JPEG, you can seek to achieve the smallest size for photo images.

PNG
This format offers a palette as well as maximum color range. Also, if allows for transparency that includes alpha channel. This is increasingly becoming the most popular format for saving images.