Image compression balances visual fidelity with file weight. This guide covers lossless and lossy strategies, perceptual metrics, chroma subsampling, and practical workflows you can adopt today.

• Choose format wisely: JPEG/AVIF/WebP for photos, PNG/SVG for graphics.
• Pre-size assets to render size—don’t ship 4K to a 300px slot.
• Automate: CI image pipelines ensure consistency.

Use the tools above to experiment with quality settings and find your site’s sweet spot. Monitor Core Web Vitals after changes.

JPEG excels for photos, PNG offers transparency and crisp edges for UI, WebP strikes a versatile balance, and SVG scales infinitely. Consider browser support, transparency, animation, and editability when deciding.

Use <picture> to provide modern formats with safe fallbacks.

Optimized imagery improves LCP, CLS, and INP, cutting bounce and lifting conversions. Pair compression with responsive images, lazy loading, and semantic alt text to strengthen accessibility and rankings.

Validate with PageSpeed Insights and Search Console’s Core Web Vitals reports.

Smart cropping preserves salient content across breakpoints. Techniques include face detection, saliency maps, and rule-based anchors. When ML isn’t available, heuristics like center-weighting and safe margins work surprisingly well.

Workflow: detect subject → compute crop window by aspect ratio → adjust to bounds → preview across sizes. Validate with A/B tests on click-through and engagement.

• Prefer person/face regions for hero banners.
• Use focal region metadata when available (CMS).
• Batch pre-generate crops for common ratios.

Effective watermarks balance protection and aesthetics. Use high-contrast outlines, subtle opacity (30–50%), and margins. For logos, prefer monochrome PNGs. For legal needs, embed invisible watermarks server-side.

Place watermarks away from faces, text, or focal elements. On small thumbnails, omit watermarks to maintain clarity; enforce protection on large previews and originals.

After extracting dominant colors, test combinations against WCAG 2.2 contrast ratios (AA/AAA). Consider color vision deficiencies by simulating deuteranopia/protanopia.

Map palette roles: primary, secondary, accent, background, surface, and text-on-variant. Create semantic tokens to decouple design from raw HEX values.

Classical chroma keying works for studio shots. For natural scenes, trimap-based matting and deep learning (e.g., U2-Net, MODNet) outperform heuristics. Evaluate artifacts along hair and semi-transparent regions.

Export to PNG for transparency, feather edges lightly, and add shadows to avoid cut-out appearance.

Strip metadata, collapse transforms, and remove unused defs to slim SVG. Sanitize any untrusted markup to mitigate XSS vectors via event handlers or external references.

For crisp rendering, align strokes to pixels and prefer shape-rendering hints for icons.

Sprite sheets reduce HTTP requests and improve rendering consistency. Thumbnails tailored per breakpoint prevent overserving bytes. Automate generation and cache aggressively with immutable file names.

Measure outcomes with synthetic and real-user monitoring to validate gains.