One of the most common reasons a website feels slow is oversized images. A photo straight from your phone or camera can easily be 4,000 pixels wide and several megabytes in size, but the space it actually fills on your website might only be 800 pixels across. The browser still has to download the full-size file, though, and that takes time — especially on a mobile connection.

Image Resizer is a free Windows desktop app we have built to make it quick and easy to resize your images before you upload them to your website. It is lightweight, simple to use, and does exactly what it says on the tin. We’ve made a standalone version available below, along with a version you can install on your Windows PC or laptop should you wish to.

How it works

Download Image Resizer using the link further down this page and run it on your Windows PC. Select the images you want to resize, choose your target dimensions, and the app will produce smaller, web-ready versions for you to save. That is all there is to it.

You can use it to resize individual images or work through a batch of them in one go. The resized files are ready to upload straight to WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, or any other platform you happen to be using.

Why this matters for your site

When someone visits your site, their browser downloads every image on the page. If those images are far larger than they need to be, the page takes longer to load. That affects the experience for your visitors, and it affects how search engines like Google assess your site. Page speed is a ranking factor, and unnecessarily large images are one of the easiest things to fix.

As a rough guide, most images on a standard business website do not need to be any wider than around 1200 to 1600 pixels. Blog post featured images, product photos, and team headshots can usually sit comfortably at 1200 pixels wide without any visible loss in quality. Hero or banner images that span the full width of the screen might benefit from being a little wider, but rarely need to go beyond 1920 pixels.

By resizing your images before uploading them, you can often reduce file sizes by 80% or more without any noticeable difference in how they look on screen. A 4MB photo becomes a 200KB image, and your visitors get a noticeably faster experience as a result.

A few practical tips

Keep your images at 72 DPI for web use. Print resolution (300 DPI) is unnecessary for anything displayed on a screen and just adds to the file size.

If your website or content management system offers built-in image compression (WordPress has several plugins for this), resizing beforehand and compressing on upload gives you the best of both worlds.

JPEG is usually the best format for photographs. PNG is better for graphics, logos, or images with transparency. WebP offers excellent compression and is now widely supported across modern browsers, so it is worth considering if your platform supports it.

Where to find Image Resizer

The latest version of Image Resizer is available to download here (standalone) or download the Windows installer. It is completely free and requires no account or signup.

If you have any questions about image sizes for your website or would like help optimising your site’s performance, we are always happy to help.

O’Brien Media 01793 239239 [email protected]