How to Avoid Scaling Images in the Browser

Modern websites often use a variety of images to convey information to visitors. In order to properly display an image on every kind of device, the image has to be scaled up or down to fit the size of the screen it is being viewed on. Most modern web browsers will try to automatically scale a web page’s images to fit the screen of the device being used to view the web page; however, the web browser has to use additional resources to scale the image. Scaling images can be very CPU-intensive and can slow down the website loading times on devices with weaker CPUs, like tablets or cell phones. In addition, a properly scaled image is usually smaller and faster to download than an image that the web browser has to scale for display.

Using images that have been scaled before being shown to visitors can significantly improve website loading performance for websites with many images. While WordPress does provide tools for managing and scaling images when uploading images, they can also be scaled before uploading them to WordPress using image editing software. There are also numerous WordPress plugins and themes that will help you scale your website images automatically.

Having properly scaled images improves website loading performance by reducing the amount of data needed to load while simultaneously preventing the web browser from spending time rendering larger images, instead of downloading more data.