The second option is to make the graphic or photo download fast. There are several ways to do this. This will undoubtedly make the image smaller. Regardless of cropping or flat-out resizing, the rule of thumb is to make the graphic as small as you can while also allowing you to have the desired effect. The second consideration is to use a graphics program to decrease the number of colors in the graphic before saving it.
Fewer colors can often mean a smaller file size, hence a faster download.
This technique doesn t help us on photos as they are going to look very poor at 256 colors. This works best on non-photo graphics such as this one. The third consideration is how to save the file. I m not going to go in to the technical points of how these work except for the fact that graphics with a lot of colors typically look best relative to download speed as jpeg files. Those with few colors typically look best relative to download speeds when saved as gif files.