Introduction

As a webmaster, I'm always looking for new ways to reduce the total amount of bandwidth (website data being requested by client and sent from server) our website uses to save money on what can be expensive monthly hosting bills.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the luxury of unlimited outbound bandwidth like past years. This can be attributed to several reasons; firstly we draw a quite a bit of traffic, as a result we no longer use a shared server but our own dedicated servers which obviously means we no longer use free servers, like in the early days of our existence. If you want a website which is going to be up and accessible 24 hours a day, like we try to maintain here at TweakTown, you have to pay for it - and this usually includes outbound bandwidth transfer. Because of this, webmasters spreading the globe have to continually look at new ways of reducing the amount of bandwidth their websites use for the simple reason, bandwidth is not cheap. Being a tech site, we include a lot of JPEG (or JPG as they are also known as - I will refer to JPEG as JPG in this article. "JPG" is the three letter DOS extension of JPEG) images in our content, which is one of the biggest elements of our website that draws the most amount of bandwidth.

As a side note, a new version of JPG is currently being developed, currently dubbed JPEG2000. This new version of JPG is apparently set to improve the current JPG compression making images load quicker by improved compression methods. According to the JPEG2000 website: "The JPEG 2000 initiative is intended to provide a new image coding system using state of the art compression techniques, based on the use of wavelet technology. Its architecture should lend itself to a wide range of uses from portable digital cameras through to its use in advanced pre-press, medical imaging and other key sectors."

I've written this basic article for webmasters and site owners showing how they can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth they use by compressing JPG images, one of the most common formats for web images. While we don't normally publish web development type content like this on our site, looking around at various sites, I thought this article may prove to be useful for some. This article was not intended to be read by experienced webmasters with knowledge in the area of JPG compression, but webmasters who don't know how to tweak images by compressing them down thus saving incredible amounts of bandwidth and decreasing page load times, yet maintaining image quality.