While they are excellent for capturing your user’s attention and are universally liked for providing short bursts of information in an entertaining way, GIFs were not designed for animation (despite them being commonly used for such).

Performance matters when it comes to designing your web pages, and GIFs are not the most performant of image options. This article will cover ways to optimize your GIFs, both static and animated, and will offer an excellent alternative you can use to eliminate the page bloat resulting from use of GIFs as animation. If you are using GIFs on your sites, it’s important that you take care to optimize your GIFs so that they do not create too much overhead. In spite of their popularity and ubiquitousness on the Internet ( especially with regards to animated GIFs), GIFs are not the most performant of image options. This frame animation feature of GIFs ensures that the format remains popular, despite the rise of JPEG and PNG images. And to this day, little has changed regarding GIFs.ĭue to its simplicity, the widespread support for this format, and the ease with which it can be used to stream video clips, the GIF format is the oldest file format still commonly used today. Furthermore, web developers and designers could create animations via timed delays. Debuted by Steve Wilhite of Compuserve, GIFs improved on the black-and-white images in use during that time by allowing the use of 256 colors while maintaining a compressed format that could still be loaded by those utilizing slow modems. The GIF ( Graphics Interchange Format) format was originally developed in 1987.

Gif file size reducer