Oh of course compressing works but best one is inline coding, that means its even much more faster, it opens lightening fast. Because if you use image url, even same host, browser tries to check the url and its additional time. With inline image code its fastest image loading, like showing text on page. G00gle also use this technique on image search. And also you should use cdn, I suggest cloud flare, they have free plan and cdn includes it. check your site speed on geopeeker . com and tools.pingdom . com and check after adding cloudflare, you will see the difference.
And lastly use ht tp, not ht tps, because ht tps is around 100ms slower because it checks security etc. By the way here is the site to convert image to inline code:
base64-image . de
So you should compress first and then convert it to inline code. And about my method, its simply fake g00gle page but with better designing of course.