Images are the real essence of your websites, and it’s a no brainer. Without any images, it is tough to engage your audience for long. Not only that, but in the absence of the images, the content on your website will look dull.
There are so many obvious reasons why you should use images on your website, and one of the core reasons is that images minimize the bounce rate. However, the images also improve overall web performance. Bing and Google, along with the other search engines, detest websites with heavy images, and slow loading speed. Heavy images drastically decrease page loading; as a result, the bounce rate of the site increases.
You must have noticed that some of the websites display very high-quality images without losing their quality. To help you understand and imitate the same practice, and help your website get ranked in search engines in the process, we have compiled a list of the actionable steps which online eCommerce shops, bloggers, and the SEO company in Irvine CA can utilize to improve the site’s speed.
Optimizing images of your website will benefit it in many ways; unfortunately, not all the developers and website owners take it seriously. Let’s take a look at the four reasons why optimizing images is critical for the long-run health of your business.
Light websites
Light images improve the load speed of your website. On the other hand, if the images you used are heavy, they will take up more space on the disk of the webserver. Therefore, it will require more bandwidth to extract images from the server to display them. Extracting of the images is not an issue if the website is hosted on a server with a top-notch bandwidth and abundant disk space. However, in this case, be prepared to pay a huge hosting expense.
You can optimize the images that you will use on your website and reduce the disk space and bandwidth of the webserver. That way, the images load easily even if you have slow internet connections on a portable device like your phone.
Increase page speed
The lighter the images, the better will be the page speed of your website. Websites with lighter images perform well, and they require a minimum time to load all the assets on the website. It serves its visitors well, and the desired function on each web page loads quickly. Therefore the images optimized can easily be displayed on various browsers and screen sizes.
SEO Benefits
It’s not just the humans, but the search engine crawlers like Google love websites with improved page speed. In its recent updates, Google has announced that the page speed of a website is one of the critical ranking factors.
When you optimize the images, what you do is increase the page load time. And Google algorithm prefers all those websites which load quickly. On the other hand, websites with slower load speed are penalized by Google.
Improved load time means a boost to the SERP ranking, and the search engines rank a website with the most relevant information and faster loading time. It is one of the critical factors which Google pays attention to as it contributes to great user experience.
Better user-experience
To provide the best user experience, you have to implement good practices like optimizing the images and structuring the web pages in the best possible way so that they display better and load faster.
Read on the following tips that can either be used individually or collectively to achieve the best performance of your website.
Tips to optimize the images for a faster page loading:
- Choose the right format
- Begin image resizing and formatting
- Check the image quality
- Understand the lossless compression and the lossy compression
You have tons of formats available at your disposal which you can use for the images on the website. Some of the famous formats that you can choose from are as follows:
Portable Network Graphic (PNG) – A PNG is recommended when you are using lossless compressions. Both the image quality and file size are very high.
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) – A JPEG has much lower quality than a PNG, and its file size is less. It uses lossless and lossy compression algorithms and has been widely used in digital camera images.
It is important to get familiar with how to use PNG and JPEG files to ensure the best performance of the website. Different web developers recommend various methods according to their experience. Some suggest that you can remove the background, but that is not possible with JPEGs. However, you can compress them to smaller file size.
Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) – Because of its small file size, a GIF is great for animated images, and it only uses lossless compression. Today GIFs are very popular way to display animated pictures both on the blog posts and social media.
Whatever kind of images you use for website, make sure you use them according to the recommended practices by the SEO company in Irvine CA.