Images are visual elements that are made to overall give flair to your website. It is made for attracting different groups of people and making the website interactive. Also, images are incorporated in a site to bloom up the bland content you have. However, these contents have eaten up a large number of data, which can contribute to your website and webpage’s slow loading speed. It may come to a time where you are accessing a specific page, and all texts are done loading, but there are a lot of white spaces in the page wherein the images are not loading.
You can solve this problem by efficiently optimizing all the images you are posting in your WordPress site. By doing this, you can easily make your page loading speed faster. This boost of speed can help you rank higher in search engine results page. Another thing is that your website traffic will increase because of your site is loading faster than before. The bounce rate will also become lower since no more people will go out of your site quickly because of your slow loading speed.
Did you like those advantages? Continue reading, and we will show you six different ways on how to optimize all of your images into contributing to giving your website faster loading speed.
Table of Contents
Choose the right file type
Let’s start with your image file extension. There are two different file types for images that are commonly used by website developers and content creators. These are PNG and JPEG.
First off, PNG files are the ones that end in .png, commonly used for different web images that need a transparent part in the photo, such as logos. It also features lossless compression which is used primarily by different photographs. This kind of compression results to bigger file size, however, the complete feature of the image is not compressed in any form.
Lastly, JPEG files are the ones that have a file extension of .jpg in an image file name. These are mainly used as extensions for photographs and images that showcases many colors. However, this is better used if you need a small image file size than saving it as PNG. If you would be requiring a lot of colors or smaller file size, use JPEG, or else, PNG.
Resize images
According to this product photography guide from Shopify, it is vital to strike a balance between images that are large enough for your users. It is also important to make sure that you are using the right sizes of the images. There are three different ways on how you can resize your image.
First, you may use the WordPress Media Library since you are in a WordPress site and it is a built-in feature for your website. The second way is through a plugin. There are a lot of plugins available for different kinds of help that you need for your site, especially for resizing images. Lastly, you may use different software before posting it on your WordPress site. There are Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, even Paint! Another tip is that when resizing, you are making the file size smaller. On average, a 1200 px image has a 394kb image file size, when those pixels are reduced to half, the file size becomes 154kb.
Crop images
Another way to make your image smaller is to crop your photos. This technique is better if your image has a lot of space that is not needed in the image.
For example, you have a picture and your subject in only on the left side of the image, and it is advisable to crop your photo. Cropping is like cutting a part of a photo with a pair of scissors. It is helpful to crop pictures if you want your viewers to focus on a specific element of a photo, instead of not taking out the possible distraction or a non-sense part of a photo. In that way, you
Lower image quality
Lossy compression is the same as creating a lower image quality for your photo. It helps in giving a faster page speed for your website since the process is saving the image into a smaller file size by compromising its quality. Some contents in a site do not need a high-quality image, except if the content is about high-quality. As long as the image served its purpose in the content, especially if it is in a lower quality, it is good to go. The process of producing images in lossy compressions is irreversible.
Serve images on a CDN
Content Delivery Network, or CDN for short, are different servers in a single network that is used by a lot of websites to load their site faster. Those different servers are distributed around the world. It helps a lot in having a faster loading speed because the server nearer to the user will assist in delivering the content to him or her, which makes the exchange of data quicker.
All you need to do is to get a CDN account online and synchronize all of your data and information in your site to the whole network. From there, all of your data will be delivered throughout by a server near to a person accessing your site.
Get lazy loading
Lazy loading of images is a creative way done by a lot of websites online. It is the process of delaying the loading of different photos in your site until when the user needs them. For instance, for a website that needs to be scrolled down to read the whole content, images will only load when it appeared on the user’s screen after scrolling down. If the user did not reach that point of the place of the picture, the photo would not load. It will be easier to access your site with this feature because not all contents are loaded in an instant.
With these six steps that we have given to you, slow loading speed because of images will not become a problem anymore. There are a lot of potential website traffic is wasted because of slow loading speeds. However, you are good to go, and your images will never be a problem.
Author Bio
Juliette Anderson is an Outreach Community Specialist for an e-commerce fulfillment company that specializes in partnering with online sellers who have an average parcel weight of 5+ pounds or greater. She works hand-in-hand with e-commerce stores to achieve optimal sales for four years already. Her specialty lies in social media marketing and paid promotions.