File size

This morning I was asked by a third party agency I'm working with to reduce the file size of an image I had supplied. It occurred to me that I haven't thought about file size's in a long time; it's just one of those things I assume happens. The image, a small image in terms of dimension (slightly smaller than the highly relevant larger woman below) was 700kb. It got me wondering in a world where most people have fast broadband on their PC's but slower connections on their mobiles exactly what is a good file size these days? It used to be the smaller the better, but then again there must be a balance between byte saving and quality.

I'm sure designers and site-builders do think about file-sizes. If they don't they should be  Search engine's will penalise slow sites in their rankings so having a 700kb image is just stupid. If you downloaded that on your phone it would practically be indescent (my poor inadequate tarriff).

 

So what is a good size? What can you do make things smaller (and I don't mean stand in the cold). I thought it was probably just smaller image sizes, good compression, simple design. A quick Google search tells me that, as usual, things have moved on since 1995.

Check out Yahoo's tips on speeding up your site.

It talks about everything from managing cache, using content delivery networks,  how you code, etc. Optomising images is just a tiny tiny bit of it. 

Anyway check it out and consider if you need to start putting your website on a diet.