Large image sizes are a big issue for web users, it can potentially slow down a website and worsen user experience, hence it’s important to pay attention to image sizes when working with web page design.
Canva has built-in options to determine the size of images. From the advanced settings panel, it’s possible to select The resolution and quality of your design, less quality design means less file size, same goes for image resolution.
But sacrificing, image quality for a smaller file size is too much sacrifice that can defeat the purpose of the design and affect the end result which is to properly convey a message. No one likes to see poor-resolution images on the website, it’s a turn-off.
Let’s see some possible ways to reduce image and graphic file sizes in Canva without losing image quality.
Table of Contents
Cropping
Canva has a built-in tool that allows you to choose the exact image resolution needed for a particular design. But this feature is only available for Canva pro users.
It’s good to always download the resolution needed for a particular project, for example, a blog banner can do well with 800×400 pixels but a large banner print of 10×10 needs around 3000×3000 for 300dpi resolution.
Image compression formats
Compressing images allows for reducing the file size of your design and also strips off unnecessary data that’s adding to the size of the design with the quality of the image preserved.
Canva allows you to download your designs in several image formats. PNG and JPG are two of the most popular compression methods on Canva.
PNGs are a lossless compression ratio while JPGs are a lossy compression ratio, what this means is, JPG can compress your Canva designs more. Canva already has a built-in JPG compression making it possible for you to download your designs in the format. To download your Canva designs in jpg, open the design editor, create your graphics, click on the “Share” then find the “Download” menu, and select the JPEG option from the dropdown list, your design will be downloaded in JPG format, and the size will be much reduced compared to if you download the design in PNG format.
Now, the image quality and size of the file are tied to the number of colors used in the process of designing, if you want less image size in Canva, you may need to use minimal design elements and stick to a few colors, but that might work in some cases and not in others. So, even when you use the JPEG image compression algorithm to extract your design, it might not be reducing the file so much in the way you expect. In this case, you might need to further compress the image and below are two more methods.
Online compression
There are several great websites that offer free compression solutions. These tools have powerful image compression algorithms that works with image formats such as JPG, PNG, and GIF files and in most cases, they can further reduce your Canva design file size by up to 90% without reducing the quality of the image. Here are some of the best online image compression websites to reduce the size of your image:
- Compresspng
- JPEG Optimizer
- Tiny PNG
- Optimizilla
- JPEG.io
- ImageRecycle
- Compressor.io
- Ezgif
- Dynamic Drive Optimizer
Converting the image to Webp
If you’re on a web project, then think of WEBP for your image formats. Webp was developed by Google and it defines “WebP as a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.”
Converting your exported Canva designs to Webp for website design usage is a smart thing to do, an online image conversion tool like CloudConvert (https://cloudconvert.com/png-to-webp) offers image conversion algorithm tools, which means you can convert your PNG or JPG Canva files to Webp using any of the tools as Canva don’t support Webp format right now.
Another way to create your own Webp is to upload the image to your WordPress media library, visit the link of the image to see it, and use a chrome extension like screengrab to export images in Webp without losing the quality of the image. Webp format can further reduce your file size by more than 26% in some cases we get up to 80% reduction.
