WWW… Wednesday! Image Optimization Made Easy with Squoosh

You’ve just spent countless hours perfecting new content for your website, and now it’s finally time to see it all in action. You’ve uploaded everything, hit refresh, and… 15 seconds later, the site finally loads. Naturally, after working so hard on these images, you’ll want to present them in the best light possible. While it can be tempting to upload them at a high resolution, this can make for a slow-loading website. In a market where you are competing for attention, a page that takes too long to load can spell disaster. Striking a balance between speed & resolution can be tricky.

Fortunately, Squoosh, a new app from Google, helps to make this balancing act a bit easier. The app features a drag and drop interface, allowing users to upload their content and choose from an array of compression standards. Perhaps the best feature is the slider that displays the native resolution alongside the new compressed version, allowing you to visualize the compression in real time. As an added bonus, the app works online and offline.

Try Squoosh for yourself here.