How Come My Website Loads Slow?

Often times, people may contact us and say that the 'web site is running slow' because images load very slowly.

Nowadays, many people upload photos from their digital cameras. As these photos get larger in size, they also become heavier and heavier in file size. Some of these images can even be many megabytes in size.

Many new webmasters are not aware that these large images take quite a long time to download when they are placed on a website. It is a common mistake to simply upload these large files and then use your local web design tool to re-size an image to size it. Even though the image displays smaller, it does not change the file size of the source image.

Here is an example:

Link 1 (Loading Slow) - This is what it looks like when a large image is resized with HTML.

Link 2 (Loading Properly) - And this is what it looks like when the image is resized before being uploaded.

To fix this, you will need to resize your images in a graphics editor (ie. Photoshop Elements, MS Paint, Gimp) before you upload the image.

Here are some links to popular image editing software:

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/ (Photoshop Elements is the slimmed down and easier to use baby brother of the industry standard Photoshop)

http://www.gimp.org/ (GIMP is a free image manipulation tool that is little tougher to use, but has almost the same feature set as Photoshop)

There are also products that come with both Windows and Macintosh computers that will help you resize images.