Image Optimization With Smush It

As many people have complaint about loading speed of new stuff.co.nz, I am doing some research on website optimization. Reducing image size is one of common ways.  There are many good image editing tools that allow us to get the best visual result for a certain file size but "under the hood" a lot more optimization can be done.

Smushit.com is a service that goes beyond the limitations of Photoshop, Fireworks & Co. It uses image format specific non-lossy image optimization tools to squeeze the last bytes out of your images - without changing their look or visual quality. You'll get a report of how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images and all the changed images as a single zip for download.


Yahoo exceptional performance team have built a image optimisation tool. Its amazingly easy to run.

1. Install the firefox plugin and press on the little face on the bottom of the browser.
   
2. Smushit will open a new tab and run the optimisation  process on the fly.
   
3. Download the optimised images in a zip file!

After run the tool on stuff.co.nz homepage, 69.34k can be saved.see screenshot below: 

Now there’s no excuse for having bloated images. Every web developer should have this plugin installed !