Optimising images for the web is a tricky business. You have to get the right balance between filesize and picture quality. It is an essential step though. Look at any webpage, and you will see that most of its load time comes from images. Your website will be needlessly slow if you don't drop the sizes of these images.

There are three key areas where bytes can be shaved off your graphics: bit depth (number of colours), resolution, and dimension. Here I'm going to show you the practicalities of web graphics optimisation, and less of the technicalities. You don't need expensive graphics editors to compress the sizes of your images, as there are plenty of free utilities and shareware that will do the job for you.