Serve optimized images
Most Magento-powered online stores use images extensively across their website. Rich and high quality product image can drive engagement with your customers and lead to purchases. Images are also used in your Magento skin (i.e. the theme).
However, such images can be a source of delay for your customers, especially if they are not optimized. Thankfully, there are many ways to compress and optimize your Magento images to ensure lightening fast page load times for your customers. In many cases images can be compressed with no loss of quality what so ever - so it's a no brainer!
Yahoo! Smush.it
Yahoo! Smush.it is a great way to get your image sizes down. Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a "lossless" tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality. Yahoo! offers an online web service to quickly compress images that you upload or provide a public URL for.
Magento Extensions
Instead of manually optimizing your skin and catalogue images by hand, you can use Magento plugins to automatically optimize
your existing images, as well as any newly added images going forward. Plugins are available from: