You’ve experienced it before. You visit a website and the images take too long to load, so you leave. Google is now penalizing sites with poor load speed on search engine result pages. Don’t give your website visitors this bad experience. Use these simple tips to optimize your images for the web so your pages loads quickly and keeps them engaged. 

Understand image loading formats

There are two primary ways that images load on the web. 

Loads the image in full quality in 1 pass. This creates poor experience for the user, especially for large images. They may leave your website if they can’t see your content fast enough. 

Here is an example of single pass loading in action: 

Multiple Pass (Progressive for JPEG, or Interlaced for PNG & GIF files)

This method loads several images in increasing quality in multiple passes. It starts with an image that is low quality but loads quickly and eventually loads the full resolution image. This format creates a better user experience because the user is at least given something instead of nothing while the high resolution image is on the way. 

Here it is in action:

Single Pass (Baseline Format)