I’ve talked about this before in some of the presentations and workshops I have given at various conferences around North America! However, I thought tonight I would highlight how truly simple it is for high-traffic web sites to save an enormous amount of bandwidth…even when optimizing imagery that are already under 10 KB in size.
If you take a look at Google.com, you will see the very-definition of a clean, simple user interface! 2+ KB of HTML code, and one 8+ KB image (11 total Kilobytes being processed). Why bother concerning ourselves with that one 8 KB image? Let’s take a look and see if we might answer that question…
Unoptimized 276×110 pixel .gif logo – 8,558 bytes
Optimized 276×110 pixel .png logo – 6,289 bytes
Converting from 239 to 128 colors (7-bit), converting from .gif format to .png format and subsequently “defragging” the newly-created .png image will result in a 2.21 KB reduction in that image’s file size (an improvement of 27 percent). The difference of one-third and one-fourth of the time it takes for the human eye to blink, right? Correct…IF you are only considering this issue from a “micro” perspective.
Now consider the “macro” fact that google.com receives well-over one million unique visits per day, and the fact that an average of roughly 20 percent of all views of that page are occurring with an empty browser cache, according to studies conducted at Yahoo (the logo image not being in a visitor’s browser cache, either because the have not visited the web page previously or they are regularly clearing-out their browser cache between visits).
What does that mean in real numbers? If Google were to replace their current logo with the optimized one contained in this blog, they would save an average of 2.21 GB in bandwidth per day! 13.26 GB in bandwidth per month. 161.33 GB in bandwidth per year! Simply as the result of spending less than two minutes to optimize one graphic.
I don’t know if that amazes you, but it amazes me…and is the type of motivation that keeps me going and “preaching” on this issue with anyone who will give me a few minutes of their time to listen. I wish I could convince “the Big Three” (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) to give us a chance to show them what is truly possible related to image optimization! For now, however, that continues to be only a wish…
[...] but you might be one of them. If so don’t be too sad. You are in good company with Google! Yay! Read this article about Google and image optimizing. And yes, Google did learn their [...]
Left by Swedish fika » Basic and sometimes forgotten tips on how to speed things up on January 24th, 2009