If you’re building your own site or have started adding content to a WordPress (or other site) that you had built for you, one of the pitfalls is uploading large or (worse) original images to your site. While it is very convenient to upload directly from your phone or use an original image the downside is a slow-loading page and using more of your server space for the files used by your website. The issue of slow-loading pages will impact your SEO and potentially lose your visitors in the event of a “stuck” or very slow-loading page. It’s so easy to upload images and most tools allow you to do this from your phone, but this comes into the category of “just because you can it doesn’t mean you should!” because as a rule of thumb you should always resize and optimise images that you use on your website.
To help you out I’ve put together a short video showing you how to use a free tool from BeFunky which enables you to scale an image and reduce the file size before you upload it to your site. This is a critical step because slow-loading photos can really slow down the time it takes for the page to load, which not only harms your SEO but also puts off the people who do arrive at your page.
There are other ways to do this using software such as using Photoshop or Irfanview but BeFunky is convenient because it’s online and you don’t need to install or buy any software.
Alternatives to this DIY method are to use a plugin that does this whenever you upload an image to your site. If you’d rather go down that route you could take a look (for WordPress) at Imagify or ShortPixel*. They’re the two I use but there are others. Ask if you need more info!
*Disclaimer: This article contains an affiliate link to a product that I use and am happy to recommend. There is a free version of the product, which works as well as the paid version, but if you do end up using the paid version I’ll get a small commission, so thank you.