Sight is the most important of our five senses, and because of this, it’s hard to deny the interest and attention we pay to images. They are an integral part of our lives, as they help to make sense and tell stories in times when words might not be enough. When it comes to the web, images are used to set a tone and make a good impression on visitors. When it comes to your website, what do you think you can do to make your images help lower your bounce rate, improve your SEO, and keep your visitors interested?
Heavy images can significantly impact your ranking on Google and other aspects such as load time, presentation, and website performance. In this article, we’ll look at the best ways to optimize your images to keep your website looking good.
The benefits of optimizing images for your website
There are several benefits for your website in terms of optimizing your images. While many of our optimization tactics may seem obvious, they are often underestimated. When you put these strategies in place, you will notice a significant difference. Here are some of the benefits you can expect.
A lighter website: When an image is heavy, it takes up a significant amount of hard drive space in addition to requiring a lot of bandwidth to be displayed. Optimizing your images will save server space and bandwidth, which will ultimately increase your website’s speed. For sites hosted on servers where there is a lot of space, this shouldn’t be a problem.
Better User Experience: When items load quickly, and everything looks and works as it should, the visitor will be happy. Faster download times will create a positive user experience, and that is what you are looking for when operating a website.
Improved performance: As mentioned, a lighter website will download faster. When it comes to people coming to your site from a mobile device or tablet, optimized images are crucial to their performance.
Better SEO: Google loves websites that download quickly. Since loading speed is a positioning factor, the search engine prioritizes those that operate faster. You won’t want to be penalized by a slow site, so image optimization is essential.
Here are our 3 tips to optimize the images of your website
1. Choose the right format
You’ve taken a picture of a setting you love or found an image online that you are allowed to post on your website. Now, before clicking on save, pay attention to the format of the file. There are several types of file formats for images on the web. Choosing the right format is crucial when it comes to loading speed and overall site performance. The main formats you should choose are:
PNG: PNG stands for Portable Network Graphic, and these images are great for the web and the most popular choice. Image quality and format size will remain high as this format uses a form of lossless compression. However, avoid using an abundance of PNGs as their accumulation can take up a lot of space.
JPEG: JPEGs undoubtedly have poorer image quality than PNGs, but a smaller file format. This is another format that is widely popular on the web and is used often.
GIF: If you’ve ever been on the Internet, chances are you’ve experienced a GIF. These are ideal for moving images because they use lossless compression.
We have argued that most web designers and programmers use JPEG, which provides a small file size and many choices. PNG is also popular, but as we mentioned, it should be used less often and reserved for images with a small size at the base. The use of GIFs and their popularity has certainly continued to grow, although they should be reserved for places that require a little humor and popularity.
2. Resize and compress
Compressing images is crucial for the optimization of a website. Keep in mind that compression can sometimes decrease the quality of your images. Because of this, there are specific ways to approach this problem and prevent it from happening. Adequately modifying the size of an image will amount to changing its proportions instead of making it smaller. What do we mean by that? In effect, this means that you have to make sure to resize the selected images before sending them to the browser, rather than choosing their size and width attributes in the HTML code.
This helps to save space on your hard drive and bandwidth on your host. Another important point is to ensure that if you change your site’s layout and dimensions, you are doing all the work by changing your images’ size. Finally, many developers and designers believe that images with a large size have better quality; however, this is not the case. The best rule of thumb is to find the right size/quality ratio.
As mentioned, image files can be compressed with or without loss, but it is important to understand what these terms mean.
Lossy: When an image is lossy compressed, it loses its news content, and only part of it is recoverable. This means that the file size is significantly reduced, but its quality is not affected. Lossy compression is popular among JPEGs.
Lossless: As the antithesis of lossy compression, lossless compression means that when the image is compressed, all information is intact. An image that has undergone lossless compression will need to be decompressed before being published.
3. Quality and relevance
When we reduce the file size of an image, it shouldn’t reduce the image’s quality. However, shrinking an image properly will save space on your site’s hard drive without affecting its quality. The higher the quality of the image, the larger the file size will be. An image can be reduced from 0 to 100%, but it is recommended to keep it between 10 and 20% do not have a visible impact on the image while reducing it. You can do this manually using software or a photo editing tool.
When choosing images for your website, on the user experience side, know that they must be relevant to the content you publish. There’s no point in posting images just for posting, so make sure they support your written content. It is also good to ensure the same size and correctness of the images and crop.
Do you want to launch your online business presence? Are you looking for Web Development in Pakistan to upgrade your web design? Count on us to get competing Web Design and Development services.
Wisdom of Life 