What is the best image size for the web?

Creating your first page for the web and placing the image there, you ask yourself: what image size will be optimal?

To answer this question, you need to determine the main requirements for the image:

- The image should be of good quality -
- The page loading should be fast -

But how can this be done if these two requirements are mutually exclusive: if we have a high quality image, then it is large in size and transmission over the network can take a considerable amount of time. Conversely, by making the picture small, it will be difficult to understand what is still presented on it.

Having gotten all the requirements and conditions, it remains to determine the optimal image size for viewing on most users' devices.

In our time, more and more space is being won by mobile devices. They already have the largest percentage in total. They do not need a large image size, but the user should be able to zoom the image. And the optimal size is the picture with a side not exceeding 960 pixels.As for monitors, they have a fairly large size, which does not require a separate zoom. And the size of 960 pixels is great for them too.

Of course, if we capture a world map or want to print a poster using this image, we need other dimensions, but for the web - 960 pixels will be just right. By the way, Photo-Pick uses exactly this approach. Thus, the image quality remains high on any device, and the rendering speed is good even with a weak network bandwidth.

And as an example one of the photo albums, where the size of the side does not exceed 960 pixels: