Smush it! image optimization

I have had the pleasure of listening to Nicole Sullivan recently about website performance optimization and the impact it has on the bottom line. Read her blog.

Nicole and her teammate Stoyan have now released a very cool Firefox extension called smush! it that downloads the images on a webpage, smushes them (ie reduces their file size) and zips them all up. Just upload those optimized images back to your website or Yahoo! Store.

Even if you think that everyone has broadband, the lighter you can make your pages the better. Some of the biggest Yahoo! Stores have very heavy page weights (we are taking in some case megabytes, not kilobytes).

I cannot imagine the increase in business they’ll get if they use this tool to optimize their images. Here is an example of the homepage analysis of an Internet Retailer 500 store:

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Get the extention at www.SmushIt.com