We all know that the load time of your website is critical.

If your site loads to slow people are impatient and will simply go find another site. So you want to make sure you create a great user experience for your visitors.

Not only that, load times are an important factor when it comes to search engine rankings.

One of the biggest culprits of a site loading slow are big image files.

Remember every second counts and the faster your site loads the better. And as of April 21st 2015 that has become even more important because of the mobile friendly update Google has done.

More and more people are using mobile devices so you really need to be on task when it comes to your images.

I took a screenshot from a site I frequent KISSmetrics and there are some pretty interesting facts about site speed when it comes to mobile and what mobile users have encountered.

So What Can You Do?

Before you upload ANY images to your website you need to compress the file. You'll find most files will be compressed by over 80%. This is huge and will speed up your site big time.

In fact if you did a mobile test on your site one of the most common errors is that image files have not been compressed.

Here's 3 free online resources where you can compress your image files, I'm sure there is more, but these will cover all the bases for you:

http://compresspng.com/- I use this one all the time as all my images are in a PNG format.

http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx" >http://www.imageoptimizer.net/Pages/Home.aspx- you can compress any image and you can even down load this onto computer.

http://jpeg-optimizer.com/" >http://jpeg-optimizer.com/- for all those jepeg images.

Hope you found this helpful