Optimizing the images used in your themelet and throughout your content is one of the first things you should do to improve your sites performance. Too often this is forgotten and can not only impact your sites loading time, but it can also have an impact on your sites ranking in Search Engines. Below is a list of utilities that you can use to help you ensure that you site is well optimized.

Web based services

Smush.it!

Smush.it! is a web-based image optimization that was was originally a standalone service, but then bought out by Yahoo!. It can be used via the web-based application, Firefox extension or Bookmarklet. It's quick, easy and effective.

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Dynamic Drive Image Optimizer

Another web-base optimized service, this time from Dynamic Drive. There are two methods available when using this service - either directly from a url or uploading from your computer. Both work well and result in a pretty decent compression. The maximum file size that you can optimize with this service is 300kb, which in most cases should be fine. For files larger than 300kb, try on of the other services listed in this article. One nice bonus is that you can also choose an alternate format for the finished image, i.e. jpg to png or vice versa.

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Mac apps

ImageOptim

This is a really simple, but effective mac utility that lets you drag your images on to the app and have them automatically optimized. The app will remove any unnecessary information, such as file comments, exif tags and color profiles.

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PNGCrushrrr

PNGCrushrrr is a free GPL-licensed Mac OS utility for crushing down your PNG files to very small sizes. It has a drag-and-drop interface, allowing you to drag one or more PNG files into it, compressing the files and preserving the original file so you are able to compare the size difference. The creator says that PNGCrushrrr is best used on PNG-24 files.

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Windows apps

RIOT

RIOT – which stands for Radical Image Optimization Tool – is an image optimizer for Windows users that is available as a standalone application or as an extension of IrfanView. It supports inputs in JPG, PNG, and GIF files and has the ability to strip out image metadata for further reduction of file bloat. It also has some basic image-editing utilities such as pan, zoom, rotate and flip built in.

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PNGOUT

Created by game programmer Ken Silverman, PNGOUT is a popular, free, and no-frills tool for lossless optimization of your images. PNGOUT can run in the command-line or Windows Run dialog box. It has a robust set of options so that you can easily customize the way your files are compressed. It takes most of the popular image file formats (such as JPG, GIF, and PNG).

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