The team see these changes as improvements to the overall experience of using the Media Library for users of the CMS.  One of the first changes that has already been introduced is a 5mb upload limit to the Media Library and File Upload facilities.  The majority of files within the CMS Media Library are images and documents (PDFs, MS Word, PowerPoint).  The File Upload facility is more document focused.  These types of media assets should be optimised for the web, if they are to be used as a resource on a website.

Going forward, the WST and the Digital Team in Strategic Marketing and Communications, will use Siteimprove policies to monitor the use of website assets in the CMS.  This may require website owners to take remedial action to reduce file sizes, however the necessary information will be provided as part of a Siteimprove report.  

Please see the information below for some advice on how to optimise media assets before uploading them to the CMS.

Optimising Images

When developing a new website, or new website section, imagery may be required to accompany text and help with the layout of information.  Before uploading these images to the Media Library, it is important to size and optimise your images.  This will improve website / section page load times and performance overall across all devices.  There are a number of free online tools that can be used to size and optimise images, such as Pixlr and Canva.

As a guide, even the largest images required in our Content Types, for example 'DTP - Banner', can be optimised so that the file size is below 300kb once compressed.  Smaller images and graphics should also have a much smaller file size once optimised.  Use the online tools above to play around with the quality and file size of images.

Users can also find guidance on image sizes for specific Content Types by visiting our Content Type Guidance resource. 

Optimising Documents

Documents that are provided as downloadable resources for your audience as part of your website also need to be optimised.  The first step is to ensure that any embedded resources in your document such as images, graphics etc are optimised as these are the main contributor to increased file sizes.  Images can be optimised using the free online tools listed under 'optimising images' above. 

The following resources will also help with optimising documents:

• Adobe provide a free Compress PDF tool that can be used to compress newly created and existing PDFs.  This resource also contains great tools for converting document types and is a useful bookmark.
• Microsoft provide some advice to help reduce the file size of your Word documents.  This would be very useful before they are converted to PDFs.

Asset Copyright

You must have the appropriate permission to use third party images, graphics or other assets before they are uploaded to the CMS for use on your website.  It is highly important to ensure that your website content complies with copyright guidelines where third party assets are used.  Failure to do so may infringe copyright, and/or terms of use, and may result in legal action or incur additional costs.