Hello everyone. I was thinking of starting compressing the images of my forum in order to increase my websites' speed.
Does anyone of you compress the images too? What image compressor do you use and why?
CloudFlare offers different levels of compression for your images, and many other performance options, if you want to look into it. It's a bit more comprehensive than you're probably looking for, but it's free and easy to set up.
You can check out a review I've previously written based on my experience with it, here.
I personally prefer their lossless compression, as I really appreciate retaining the quality.
Personally if I'm going to go for image compression I'd be more inclined to hard compress them myself. (By this I mean open them in like photoshop and reduce their size in it.) This still reduces my bandwidth usage (even if it's only by a little bit) and end users won't really notice that much of a change. But this cuts out the middleman (cloudflare) in this case and reduces any chance of something going wrong from involving a third party into the transfer. (Host -> Cloudflare -> user and vice versa.)
Especially since lately it seems like Cloudflare has been having troubles and refusing connections. (At least on MyBB.com... which may be rejecting people because it is a larger site and all.)
I wouldn't recommend cloudflare either, had some trouble recently resulting my sites being down for a half a day and their support wasn't too helpful and slow.
