I was surprised the other day when a site is was visitng slowed to a halt for 2 small icons and was horrified to find these transparent PNGs were over 40KB each. Just 12px square these little icons took up a whopping 100kb. I quickly did some investigation and found that I could compress them to 5% of their previous size. How ?

By using a little tool from Yahoo called smush it.

This tool allows you to compress folders of files or individual files in a split second without losing any quality. Even the social icons on mashable can be reduced in size but 5% by uploading them to this tool.

I know we all sometimes can get lazy but in reality this tool make optimisation of your images easy and I think their is no excuse to not use it before going into production.

This will do 3 things,

1. Make your site faster
2. Save Bandwidth
3. Save energy / money / resources.

Check it out here - http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/