Resizing images is one of the most overlooked aspects of maintaining a website or blog. Of course, images are very important to use on your website. They draw the attention of readers, help to illustrate points, and add flourish and colour to your writing.

But you don’t want your images to work against you! If you’re not resizing your images before uploading them to your blog, you may be missing out on some important benefits for both you and your readers.

There are three main reasons to resize images before adding them to your blog posts:

1. Image loading time

Visitor experience is undoubtedly the most important factor to consider when adding content to your website. And you’ll quickly lose visitors if the images on your site take too long to load.

You might not realise that even if you’ve resized your image after uploading, visitors are still loading the full-sized images – they’re just seeing them at a smaller size. All this extra load on your site slows everything down, and the longer your site takes to load, the more people will get frustrated and potentially leave your site.

2. Size control

While content management systems like WordPress do give you the option to resize images after uploading them, these controls are limited in comparison to what you can do on your computer.

For instance, on your computer you are able to specify the exact size, down to the pixel, you want your image to be. Usually, the WordPress image editor only gives you at most three or four size options. Resizing on your computer allows for the greatest control over how big your image will appear on your site.

3. Server space

The larger your images are, the more of that valuable hosting space they’re taking up. This means that you may fill up your allocated space more quickly, and backups will take longer to process and will take up more space on your computer and/or hard drive.

How do I resize images?

OK, so now you know why it’s important to resize images on your computer before uploading them to your blog. But what’s the best way to do this? Resizing is one of the most simple tasks graphics software can do, and therefore you probably don’t need anything more sophisticated than what you already have.

Below are the easiest ways to resize your images using software that came with your operating system. Remember, when resizing, make sure to keep the image proportion (sometimes called aspect ratio) intact! Otherwise your images will look all stretched… not great!

Mac: Open your image in Preview. Go to the Tools menu and choose Adjust Size

Windows: Open your image in Paint. Go to the Home tab and click the Resize button.

There are also numerous websites that will resize your image for you. I haven’t used any, but if you do a Google search you’ll find many options to try.

I hope this has helped to understand the reasons to resize images before adding them to your blog posts. Happy blogging!

This post originally appeared on Grassroots Internet Strategy.