Size Those Images

A rather simple — and obvious to some — tip: when you're including an image on your website, size it down to the dimensions you want, in your image editing software, not in the HTML code. What this means is if you have a photo that is 400x600 pixels and you want it to show at 100x150 pixels on your page, use Photoshop, or whatever image editing software you use, to scale it down. The file size will be much lower and the image will download so much faster than if you leave the image large and rely on the browser to scale it down for you.

If you're using thumbnails of images and then asking viewers to click on those thumbnails for a larger view, I  recommend creating two versions of the image — one for the thumbnail and one for the larger version. Most people don't mind waiting a bit longer for the larger version to download if it was their choice, rather than having to wait for a page to load simply because the creator was lazy.