The strategy is to reduce the number of colors in your GIF image to the minimum number necessary and to remove stray colors that are not required to represent the image. You can take advantage of the characteristics of LZW compression to improve its efficiency and thereby reduce the size of your GIF graphics. It is less efficient at compressing complicated pictures with many colors and complex textures: The LZW compression scheme is best at compressing images with large fields of homogeneous color. The GIF file format uses a relatively basic form of file compression (Lempel Zev Welch, or LZW) that squeezes out inefficiencies in the data storage without losing data or distorting the image. Several slight variants of the basic GIF format add support for transparent color and for the interlaced GIF graphics popularized by Netscape Navigator. GIF files incorporate a compression scheme to keep file sizes at a minimum, and they are limited to 8-bit (256 or fewer colors) color palettes. The overwhelming majority of images on the Web are now in GIF format, and virtually all Web browsers that support graphics can display GIF files.
In the early 1990s the original designers of the World Wide Web adopted GIF for its efficiency and widespread familiarity. The CompuServe Information Service popularized the Graphic Interchange Format in the 1980s as an efficient means to transmit images across data networks.