TinyPNG: why your website is slow and how compressed images fix it

The weight of a photo

A photo straight from a phone can weigh several megabytes. Multiply that by a page of images and a visitor on mobile data, and your site takes long enough to load that people leave before it appears.

Search engines factor page speed into rankings, so heavy images cost you twice: visitors and visibility.

What compression actually does

TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression: it reduces the number of colors in ways the eye barely notices and strips hidden metadata, typically shrinking files by half or more. Compare the before and after side by side at normal viewing size — the difference is usually invisible.

Lossy is not a dirty word here. Photos tolerate it beautifully; logos and screenshots with sharp text do not, so compress those as PNG or leave them alone.

A workflow worth adopting

Resize before you compress: an image displayed at 800 pixels wide gains nothing from being uploaded at 4000. Then compress, then upload. The whole routine takes a minute per image.

For one-off compressions without uploading files anywhere, our own browser-based image tools do the job locally on your device.

The free tier

TinyPNG's free web version handles a limited number of images per session at limited sizes — plenty for a blog post's worth of photos. Heavy users and developers can look at the paid API for bulk work.