Tag Archives: Website Speed

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Speed Up Your Site by Optimizing Images With Google Squoosh

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In lockstep with its ongoing effort to speed up the web, Google has released a new tool for optimizing images called Squoosh.

Here’s how to get started using Squoosh:

    Squoosh App Screen Cap

  1. Visit the Squoosh website
  2. Drag and drop or upload an image

I tried it with an 8 MB image that was reduced by 93% in size with what seemed like no reduction in image quality.

The screen capture below taken of Squoosh in action was reduced in size by 93% from 1.32 MB to 94.4 kB.

Squooshed Image – 94.4 kB – 93% file size reduction

Squoosh Screen Capture Optimized

Not Squooshed Image – 1.32 MB

Squoosh Screen Capture Not Optimized

Once again, I can’t visibly detect any loss of image quality. Imagine if your whole website had images that loaded 93% faster?

Got WordPress and Jetpack? Flip This Switch to Speed Up Your Site

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Jetpack quietly rolled out an update that may or may not have triggered a notification in your WordPress backend for a new feature for speeding up your website. They’ve essentially expanded access to their global content delivery network (CDN) to serve static files in addition to images.

What this means is that images and static files can be served off Automattic’s ultra-fast servers instead of your own web host’s server. Not that we’re implying your web host is slow, it’s just that theirs is really really fast.

About half of the sites we manage that are powered by WP and have Jetpack installed received the below notification.

Speed Up WordPress

The other half did not. Meaning we had to go into Jetpack and manually turn on the new CDN for static files like JavaScript and CSS.

If your WordPress backend didn’t trigger a notification visit WP Admin/Jetpack/Settings/Writing and look for the Performance & Speed section.

Increase WordPress Site Speed

Flip the toggle switch on and you are set!