Images play a key role on websites. They display our products, aid as a design element and beautify your site.
But with having images comes the importance of optimizing them.
What If You Don’t Optimize Your Images?
There are a few things that could happen if you don’t optimize the images on your website:
- It will negatively affect your SEO.
- Large images will slow your site down.
- With a slow site, visitors will not stay long nor come back.
How To Optimize Your Images For WordPress
Optimizing Images Manually
- Make sure you save your image in the right format.
- PNG is a file type used for mainly logos, icons, graphics, illustrations, etc.
- JPG is a file type that is used for images. This is due to the fact it keeps the great quality of the images, while being able to compress them to a smaller size.
- Know what the maximum width and height need to be for your images.
- When replacing an image, you can check and see what size the current image is (the one your designer uploaded) and use those dimensions. Go to your dashboard, find the Media Library on the right and find the image there. Once you find the image, click it and the size will display on the right.
- Resize your images.
- Most images that will be used (either stock photos or from your camera) are typically too large for your website. You can easily open the image in ‘Preview’ > ‘Tools’ > ‘Adjust Size’ and then change the width and height from there.
- A good rule of thumb, images never need to be wider than 2000px – that’s for a full screen image. If the image only takes up half the screen, it doesn’t need to be any wider then 1000px.
- Compress your images.
- Depending on the photo editing tool you’re using, there are ‘save for web’ options under ‘File’ in the menu bar. But, if you are using ‘Preview’ to adjust the size then there are other ways to compress the image, after you resize it.
- My personal favorite is TinyPNG (https://tinypng.com) it does both JPG and PNG. I found it will compress images by about 20% – 80%.
- Another option is JPEG Optimizer (http://jpeg-optimizer.com), which reduces them around 60%. You can also adjust the width of the image when you upload it.
Optimizing Images Automatically
If you like to manage your own site, try adding a plugin that will auto optimize as you upload your images.
A few great plugins are:
- Smush – https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit
- ShortPixel – https://shortpixel.com
Still need help?
If you’re a FreshySites client, we would love to help you out!
Just give us a call and we can do some work on your site that will help optimize the images as you upload them. Remember, the more images you upload, the more your site can slow down and lose your great SEO value.
Customers and search engines don’t like slow sites, which could cost you business in the long run.
Always optimize your images through any method (or all) you feel comfortable with. You will see great results with the load time and your customers will continue to enjoy your site.
