Optimizing images before uploading them to your website can significantly improve your website’s loading time, speed, and ranking. Unfortunately, many businesses upload unoptimized images to their sites, resulting in a poor user experience. This article will show you the proper way to optimize your website images.
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is the process of delivering images in the correct size, format, resolution, and dimension without compromising their quality. The goal is to improve the loading speed of websites to give visitors a better browsing experience.
How to optimize website images
Here are helpful tips for optimizing the images on your website.
1. Choose the correct file format
Digital images come in various formats, but the three most commonly used types for websites are:
- JPEGs – JPEGs are the most widely used format for website images because they have an enormous color palette ideal for showing off images with complex patterns, gradients, shadows, and colors.
- PNGs – PNG files are a better choice for images with complex designs as they support a wider range of colors than JPEGs. They are also the only format that supports transparent backgrounds, making them perfect for logos and vector images. However, PNG files are usually larger than JPEGs, which can cause longer page loading times.
- GIFs—GIFs are hugely popular as animated memes on social media sites but are hardly used for static images on most websites because they support only 256 colors. Therefore, they are the best option for small images that require only a few colors.
2. Name your images properly
It’s important to use relevant keywords when naming your website images because search engines like Google crawl the text on your website and image file names. Using keyword-rich and descriptive image file names will allow search engines to provide more accurate results to customers looking for a particular product or service.
For example, if your website sells used cars, naming an image Red-Ford-Mustang-LX-2012.jpg will get more search results than a generic file name like used-car.jpg or DCIMIMAGE001.jpg.
3. Use alt tags
Alt tags are texts that appear in place of a website image that fails to load on a user’s screen. These tags allow screen-reading tools to describe website pictures to visually impaired visitors. In addition, alt tags help search engines crawl and rank your site better. Most of the time, alt tags are almost similar to image file names.
4. Resize your images
Using the wrong image size on your site can negatively impact loading times. For example, featured images in WordPress are usually 1200 x 628 pixels. Images larger than 1200 x 628 pixels will decrease the loading speed of your site. This can lead to high abandonment rates.
5. Compress your images
Image compression is the process of reducing an image’s file size without compromising its quality. This allows you to use more images on your site. The smaller image file size also helps in reducing the time needed to download or send an image over the internet.
Image optimization is a vital part of building a successful website. If you want to learn more about optimizing website images, call our experts today.