Optimizing your images across your entire site

To achieve satisfactory results, you must pay special attention to the content you post on your page. Photos are part of that and are worth your time and energy if you want to make them work in your favor. Thanks to them, you can set the right mood and tell a story to your visitors, better sell a product, or even create empathy in the readers. Choosing the right photos for your page may not be very difficult. However, optimizing your images across the website is a completely different matter. Improve your page performance, drive more traffic, and increase your profits by following the tips below.

Optimizing the images – reduce the size.

Before uploading a selected photo or illustration, always check its size. Quality images, of course, are much larger and require more time to load. This, unfortunately, only slows down the speed of your page and prevents your customers from enjoying your services. There are several ways to influence the size of images, and this is by changing their dimensions, quality, and shape. For example, professional photos can be up to 5,000 MB – something that will prevent your site from running smoothly. If you want to achieve optimal results, try to reduce them to 1400 x 1600 pcs at most. Lighten them by reducing megabytes to 1 or 2 per file. Otherwise, they will take a long time to charge. But how to reduce the size? There are several ways:

Compression of images.

Generally speaking, there are two types – lossless and lossy compression. The lossless compression preserves the quality of the images by eliminating unnecessary metadata. The lossy, on the other side, gets rid of some elements of the image by reducing its quality and size. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two variants, but when possible, go for lossless compression.

Quality of images.

If you want to improve your performance and boost your SEO, you will have to reduce the quality of the image. Sounds weird, we know! But this doesn’t mean ruining it. You can simply use an app to do so – from 100%, lower it to 40% – 50%. It won’t harm the appearance, but it will make your website lighter.

Format of the images.

There are three possible formats that you can use – JPEG, PNG, or GIF. The most common one is JPEG, thanks to its smaller size and good quality. You can easily compress images and boost their optimization. PNG is perfect when you need a transparent background. It’s the best solution for logos and illustrations because it offers the highest quality possible. The only inconvenience is that it’s larger. Finally, we have the funny GIFS – the animated pictures also offer lossless compression, but you are limited in their color range.

Optimizing your images for mobiles.

Today, the ranking of your website mainly depends on its performance on mobile devices. Ever since Google changes its practice and now evaluates mobile versions before desktop, you have to be very careful to provide quality content. For the best SEO results, the images should look impeccable on both desktop and hand-held devices. The reason for that is that mobiles attract more than 50% of the web traffic. People use them for everything – communication, shopping, entertainment, etc. We are all part of a society in which smartphones are part of our lives, and as the prognoses tell – they will stay for a long time! Make sure the user experience is smooth and satisfying. Only that way will you promote your brand and will reach your target audience.

Pay attention to the file names.

When you download a file, it comes with an automatic name, usually containing some codes or numbers. Make sure you delete them before uploading. Choose a proper name for your image – use related keywords and add descriptive labels. You will be amazed how your ranking on Google and other search engines will improve. Augment your visibility and promote your brand by simply choosing adjusted file names.

Try Lazy Load.

Lazy Load is a technique that loads the images before the user sees them. Instead of loading all at once, the images are only loaded when needed (when the user gets close to them). Save some precious data and go for this option. Where can you find it? Various WordPress themes offer this feature. If you need some guidance, Sofia Web Works would be happy to help!