WDTalk

One of the factors that affect site speed is the size of the graphics/images on your website. I can remember using different utilities back in the 90’s that compressed images because the recommended page size at that time was around 27Kbytes.

You were lucky to get transfer speeds of 32K over dial up then, so slow page downloads meant the kiss of death. I sold a ton of ISDN in the day, but by today’s standard, not only is that solution pricey, but slow by comparison to DSL, cable and fiber. 

I’m seeing a lot of websites today that aren’t optimized for speed and that’s a huge mistake. While I have a 10MByte connection at home, much of rural America still connects via dial up. Add latency to that mix and site speed becomes more important than ever. Let’s face it, we’re competing in a world-wide market, so the faster your site loads, the better off you’ll be. 

Achieving the best image quality at a given bit or compression rate is the main goal of image compression, but you should also consider scalability. This could be combined with region of interest coding to further refine your images.

A recent query on Google for “image compression” returned over 40 million results. I only had time to read the first 16 million. LOL.

PS: Google has added site speed to their ranking algorithms (America only), so speeding up site speed could reap immense benefits in SERPS as well.