How to prepare documents for your website

Before you add documents to your Media Library you need to ensure that you have reduced their filesize as much as possible. This will reduce the download times for your website visitors.

The reason document filesizes can become very large is mainly due to poorly optimised pictures embeded within the document. For example, a Word document may have had images inserted in it that have come straight from a digital camera without being resized first.

Scaling an image within Word does not reduce the filesize, you need to do this first in photo-editing software before it is embeded in the document. See our guide for help on resizing pictures.

Remove un-optimised pictures from your documents and replace with optimised ones to reduce the document filesize.

re:write also supports Acrobat (pdf) documents. These are generally better optimised for web useage so usually need no additional work. You should only use ‘low-resolution’ acrobat files though. High-resolution acrobat files are those used in commercial printing and are not suitable for web useage.