How To Use X-Cart .jpg Thumbnails For Speed And SEO

[Xzavier]

Improve the speed of your X-Cart by using JPG thumbnails instead of the default PNG thumbnails.

When creating X-Cart product images, your typical file extension choices are JPG, GIF or PNG. GIF and PNG formats are ideal when creating logos, icons, and other types of images with a limited number of colors and/or when using a transparent background. JPG formats are ideal when creating photographic type images such as product images, making it typically the ideal choice for X-Cart product and thumbnail images.

When using X-Cart to auto-generate a thumbnail, X-Cart outputs a PNG file. This PNG file will usually be very large in file size making your site load slower, and PNG files are less likely to get picked up in Google's image search than a JPG. With the changes outlined in this tutorial, you can easily auto-generate high quality JPG thumbnail images with a file size many times smaller than the generated PNGs.