Images are a fundamental part of every website and allow visitors to develop an understanding of the company’s persona, they are the fastest & most effective way to connect a user to your brand.
Although larger images hold the ability to tell a deeper story, with higher resolution comes larger files. Thus increasing website load times.
Who has patience for that?
If your web page does not load rapidly, users may become frustrated and uninterested leading to loss of potential clients.
In order to resolve this issue, it’s essential to optimize every image to reduce the file size without losing its quality.
Benefits of implementing image optimization
- Improves page loading speed
Although the website loading speed is dependent on many factors such as layout, design & images. Images consist of up to 65% of the website weight. Once optimized, there’ll be a big change in your loading speed.
- Helps boost in SEO ranking
Image optimization can be a powerful weapon in the SEO battlen. Google LOVES websites which take less time to load. Therefore, they’ll rank these websites higher in their search results.
- Improved site user experience
Overall user satisfaction and experience are critical for website return visitors.. If they’re able to locate and find the source of information they want within seconds it increases the chance of them using & recommending yoursite.
- Save server memory & reduce load on server :
Image optimization is also practical in saving server memory and reducing extra server load.
For example :
Having two of the same images, one image size is 900kb and another image size is 340kb. Not only will the second image put lower weight on the server it’ll also save you bandwidth.
The goal of image optimization is to find the correct balance between minimizing file size and sufficient quality. Images are processed before uploaded to a server through photo editing programs. Additionally, there are multiple WordPress Plugins which can automatically compress images.
Choosing the Right Format
There’s two factors to consider – choosing the right image file format & the amount of compression. The most common formats being :
- PNG : These are amazing for interactive documents such as webpages. They’re mainly used in web projects as you’re able to save your image with more colors and on a transparent background. This makes for a much sharper, web-quality image.
- JPEG : This format is widely popular as it allows excellent optimization without loss of quality.
- GIF : GIFs are most common in their animated form. In their more basic form, GIFs are formed from up to 256 colors in the RGB colorspace. Due to the limited number of colors, the file size is drastically reduced.
Reducing the Photo Size
Modern cameras & smartphones have the ability to take high resolution images. However, when creating your website it’s not necessary to upload images in full resolution, but to select the resolution which is required.
The recommended resolutions are : 800 x 533px OR 1200 x 800px – and for iPhone retina display, we recommend 96pp exports for highest clarity.
Reducing File Size using Compression
After selecting your desired image format and desired size, the images need to be compressed to reduce the file size.
There are two types of compression methods :
- Lossy : The file size is reduced by eliminating data, this is not visible to the naked eye, but can significantly reduce file size.
- Lossless : This technique does not lose any data in the compression process. Lossless compression “packs” data into a smaller file size by using a kind of internal shorthand to signify redundant data.
The below chart tells the story of why being top dog is worth all the marbles – don’t let images get in your way!
