Image compression with PayCart shopping cart

PayCart is a shopping cart extension for Joomla, a quite recent but a very promising ecommerce solution, even more if you consider that Ready Bytes is behind (they already create Payplans, one the top membership solutionfor Joomla).
Amazon's calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost 1% in sales each year (1.6 billion). Running an Ecommerce website, speed is of the key to do better sales, for 2 main reasons:

• User hates to wait
• Ecommerce product pages are usually heavy

Paycart product: http://www.readybytes.net/paycart.html

When building an Ecommerce, you need to provide eye catchy products images and maybe sliders. Each product page usually contains 3 images that have 3 sizes, thumbnail / medium / large. It may represent up to 70% of the page weight. Using an algorithm to compress images without losing the quality is a real plus.

Image compression to speed up your website

Images are an immense division of any website, especially on first page load even with client side cache system activated. Note that image compression is now a factor checked by all speed optimization tests like Pingdom, Dareboost, Google Pagespeed...

Understanding compression

Compressing images is the act of taking a graphic and making it smaller. When you think about image compression, you have in mind Photoshop export Jpeg compression options. This is indeed a compression but not a smart one. You take the risk to have either a big sized image or a bad quality one. As compression is applied on the whole image area.

There are two ways of compressing an image, which are:

• Lossy compression this eliminate data from the image, although in mainly cases the reduction in quality is not perceptible. The file size will be considerably smaller than lossless compressed images. A .jpg is an illustration of a Lossy format. If the compression levels are high or an image is repetitively saved and compressed, the image quality will speedily depreciate.
• Lossless compression is not eliminating image data, but the compression level will be smaller. This compression is perfect to keep quality or make some image modification later.

Image quality

Load faster your page and keep eye catchy images is also great. As our smart compression is applied only on specific, undetectable by human eye image zones the quality is kept.
Do you spot any difference on the before/after image optimization?

Image compression for Joomla and PayCart

ImageRecycle & PayCart

ImageRecycle extension is the only Joomla tool dedicated to that. Install the free component, register a trial account or get some optimization quota and let’s start.
Joomla free extension download and quick start guide: https://www.imagerecycle.com/cms/joomla

PayCart is taking care the image resizing part as it creates automatically images at appropriate size for your products images: thumbnail, medium, large for lightbox. This avoid the error of HTML/CSS resizing.

PayCart stores its images in the Joomla /images default folder, so our Joomla extension does not require any configuration to work, just your credentials! Then, as you can see on the image bellow all the image sizes will be compressed automatically on a background process. The % represent the weight you’ve saved after the compression.

Not sure about compression? You got a backup

If for any reason you want to restore original image, you can do that right from your Joomla backend during one month. Just use the restore button to revert the process and put your original image back in your ParyCart shop.