Have you ever been to a site and the images took forever to load?  You probably figured that there was some kind of error with the site or with their hosting and probably left.

Well visitors to your site are not any different than yourself if your images take forever to load they are going to leave too.  So how can you prevent visitors from leaving your site and costing you money or leads?

Aside from technical issues related to your server, here are a few tips to keep your site images loading faster.

• Shrink images. If you have a web designer that maintains and makes updates to your website then you probably send them the images and they take care of it from there. They should format them for the web and there is no problem.  If you maintain your own site by coding, Content Management Systems, or even blogging be aware that that image from your digital camera is going to take a while to load. Even if you have no experience altering images you can load it from your camera into a program like paint and shrink it down significantly.
• Be aware of your audience. Consider the fact that some of your visitors may have dial up Internet, making their connection significantly slower than DSL or even Satellite Internet. If you have customers with dial up it is very important to shrink images as mentioned above to optimize loading time. Also be prepared in case these dial up visitors have images disabled which brings me to my next point.
• Do not rely on images alone. Some Internet users will disable images in their browser as a preference. They may do this because they have a slow connection and skipping the loading of images enables them to load pages faster. This isn’t the end of the world, just use alt tags with your images.  Alt tags show up in place of an image if it does not load.  For example, if you have a graphic button that says “Buy Now” then give that image alt text that reads the same thing.  This way your visitor will see the alt text and know exactly what to do and what they may be missing.

Hopefully these tips will help you to optimize your website and get you on the path to achieving your web goals whatever they may be.