7 Ways that You Can Reduce Image Size on a Large-Scale Drupal Site, With a Lot of Images

Images can make or... break the user experience. Especially if we're talking about large amounts of images.

So, what are your best options to reduce image size on a large-scale Drupal 8 site?

And, most importantly:

How do you strike a balance between the smallest file size and the best possible image quality?

Well, just keep on reading...

Here are 7 ways that you can manage image compression on your image-heavy Drupal site without affecting their quality:

1. Use a PNG Optimizer to Reduce Image File Size

Let's say that you have a lot of PNG images on your Drupal website. How do you reduce the image file size?

Simple: you use TinyPNG to... squeeze them.

Expect to reduce them somewhere around 60% (while keeping the lossless image quality).

2. Use a JPEG Compressor to... Compress Your Images Server-Side 

"How to make images load faster on my website?"

Just use a compressor to reduce image size for your JPG and JPEG files:

• TinyJPG
• CompressJPEG
• Compress Now
• JPEGOptim

It will take... a while, especially since we're talking about an image-heavy Drupal site.

Different JPG files mean different settings for you to... play with till you've balanced out size and quality.

3. How to Improve Image Load Times: Use Drupal 8 Image Styles

It's a tool that you get... out of the box.

And what you gain is more control over the size of the images on your website:

Set several image styles, of different sizes, that will go on various areas of a page.

Good to know! Configure your image styles just once: from then on, they'll resize all your new images by default.

Here's how you do it:

• Go to "Manage display", in the content type setup section
• Click the gear wheel icon next to the image field to open the settings tab and choose an image style
• There, you can either choose one of the previously configured image styles or... create a new one, by selecting the "Configure Image Style" option from the dropdown menu

Source: Drupal.org         

Good to know! Once you've set your image style, the module updates all the created images... automatically.

4. Use Drupal 8 Image Toolkit to Adjust Their Quality (And Their Size)

It's the best way to resize images in Drupal 8.

And the easiest way, as well:

• Go to Admin > Configuration > Media > Image Toolkit
• Choose the setting that allows you to compress your images (the JPEG quality field)
• Play with it till your strike the perfect size-quality balance
• Save the new settings

Note! The new setting will apply to all your images; there's no way for you to adjust the quality for each image, one by one.

Tip! Stick to somewhere between 60% and 80% when setting the image quality.

5. Use the Responsive Images Module to Resize Your Images 

"Which module is used for image optimization?"

Which is the best Drupal 8 module to reduce image size on pages that contain lots of images...

Responsive Images is (but) one of them.

Here's how it works:

Its image formatter maps the breakpoint of the original image and renders a responsive image instead. All that by using an HTML5 picture tag (that has sizes and srcset attributes).

It basically enables browsers to select the image to display according to the image style selections.

And here's how you set up responsive images on your Drupal 8 website:

• Enable the module (for, even if it's a core module, it's not enabled by default) in Admin > Configuration
• Select "Responsive Image"
• Hit "Install"

What about breakpoints? How do you set them up?

• Go to your editor (if it's a custom theme that you're using)
• Create a file named "yourthemename.breakpoints.yml" in your theme directory ("/themes/custom/yourthemename")

Now, its time to configure the image styles for your responsive images:

Different breakpoints call for... different image sizes. 

Go ahead and pair each breakpoint that you set up at your_theme_name.breakpoints.yml with an image style and create your responsive image styles.

6. Use the ImageMagick Module to Reduce Image Size  

"How do I manage compression on my image-heavy Drupal site?"

You use ImageMagick.

It's another one of your best options for Drupal 8 image resize.

Here's why:

Drupal might provide the GD2 image manipulation toolkit out of the box and enable you to set multiple alternatives, of different sizes, for the same image. Yet, it lacks some key features, such as... TIFF format support or GIF support with an image style.

And this is where the ImageMagick module comes in handy.

To install it, just run this command: Composer require 'drupal/imagemagick'

And here's how you use it to reduce image size:

• enable it via ‘yoursite/ path
• set the quality for your image to 100% in the ImageMagick image toolkit

The results?

• you've just enabled the GIT format support with image style
• you've reduced your image size by 20-40%

Mission accomplished...

7. If It's Still Not Enough, Lazy Load Your Images 

"How to load images faster?"

Use the Lazy Loader, the ultimate Drupal 8 image optimization solution.

Have you tried them all — all the dedicated modules and Drupal core features available — and you're still not satisfied with how fast your image-heavy pages load?

Then go even further and incorporate a lazy loading functionality into your website.

The END!

But maybe you have better things to do — a business strategy to improve, urgent projects to work on — than finding and implementing the best solution to reduce image size on your Drupal website.

Yet, you still want to make your pages load faster...

So, just pass on the "burden" to us!

We'll identify the best solution for speeding things up on your image-heavy web pages and... implement it for you sitewide.

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay