You only have a window of eight seconds to get a visitor’s attention long enough to stay at your website. If you have not grabbed their attention with your content in that time, one third of your visitors will exit your site. If your page is still loading at eight seconds because your page is graphic heavy, you are in trouble.

Suppose your website needs the graphics because the images are essential to your subject? It could be that you have an image gallery or a shopping catalogue that you want to display. If this is the case, you will have to figure out how to cut your load times in order to keep the attention of your visitors.

You can follow a few tips to optimize your images for the web. Smaller images are considered optimized because they are bandwidth and server friendlier than larger images. Visitors also like smaller images because they know it means the web page will have a faster load time.

1. What takes large tables so long to load is that the closing tag has to be read before the table can be viewed. If you create a bunch of small tables to make up the larger table, you will be able to keep your page design while speeding up the load time.

2. Use your tags to tell browsers the size of images because if you do not, the browser will not move onto the next line of code after an image until it knows the size of the image.

3. Cropping your images can shorten load times. Cropping a picture means emphasizing the subject of the photo by cutting everything else away except for the main image. For a picture of a person, you could crop the image so only the head and shoulders remained for a close-up view.

4. Resize your images to smaller dimensions. Large images immediately put many people off because they are just too large and take up too much of the screen. You have to scroll around them to get at other content. Consider making your biggest image only 200 x 200 pixels or a similar size for a faster load time. You can reduce the size of your graphics by up to 50% and more without noticeably changing the quality of the image. Whether a JPEG or a GIF can be resized with better results will depend on the individual image. Try resizing in both formats to see which results in a better and smaller image.

5. After you have cropped and resized your graphic, you can compress the image and that lessens the graphic’s bytes without changing the image noticeably. You have some control when you are compressing a JPEG so experiment and try for the most compression to find a suitable compression level that does not distort the image too much. Allow for a bit distortion so you will get a reasonable amount of compression. You do not have control over compression when compressing a GIF and that is all right because a GIF will adjust the image to a smaller size.

You have to do what it takes to keep the attention of the visitors to your website. If you tackle the tables, add the size tags and make your graphics smaller, your web site will move towards a faster load time and this will convince your readers into hanging around and checking out your content.