Optimizing Website Imagery – Your Complete Guide

Fully optimized website images that load quickly are essential to creating a good user experience for your website visitors. There are lots of rules to consider for uploading website images so they please the user, but what about Google? You might think it’s simply a case of uploading images to your website, and you’re good to go, but there’s more to it than that.

Your pictures need to please Google too.

According to data from Moz, a third of all Google searches are for an image, so you can’t afford to overlook this in your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Compelling imagery can increase your website’s visual appeal, keep page visitors interested in your content, and help demonstrate the relevance of your written content. When you optimize your images for SEO, you are creating additional ranking opportunities for your content, faster page loading speeds, better website performance, and enhanced user experience.

Website imagery goes beyond traditional photographs; banners and icons are images too. Failure to make sure each of these is fully optimized will lead to your website’s storage being eaten up and slow page loading speeds, which will see visitors click off your page in search of a quicker site.

An eye-watering 40% of users will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Scary, right?

If image optimization has got you in a spin, don’t panic! Our complete guide will look at the following:

• What is image optimization?
• The benefits of image optimization
• How to optimize images for the web
• Recommended tools for image optimization

Let’s get stuck in!

What Is Image Optimization?

Image optimization is done by reducing the size of your image files as much as you can without harming their quality, which would make your website look bad. Large image files slow your web pages down, which makes visiting them a drag for the user. To help your SEO rankings, images must look good and load quickly for mobile and desktop browsers. Image file size, compression level, height and width all influence image optimization.

Benefits Of Image Optimization On Website Performance

Images are the biggest contributor to page size. The larger your page size, the longer it will take to load. According to HTTP Archive, images that haven’t been optimized take up 3 quarters of a webpage’s weight, which can negatively affect your website’s performance. Optimized images mean your website has a lower weight, which brings with it these core benefits:

Better Page Loading Speed

Page load speed or page load time refers to how fast content loads on your page. The quicker a web page loads, the better. Optimizing your images makes web pages load more quickly, which creates a better experience for visitors. As mentioned above, if it takes too long for your website to load, visitors will get fed up and find something else to look at, resulting in missed sales and new customers.

Increased Rankings

Optimized images on your website help search engines and users understand your content better. This is important if you want your content to rank on Google’s hallowed first pages. In addition to this, optimizing your images increases your opportunity for your images to appear in Image Search, which can bring you more traffic.

Making sure that every aspect of your web pages is fully optimized plays a big role in Google’s Core Web Vitals – 1 of the signals the search engine uses to rank pages.

Core Web Vitals are the 3 web page experience metrics that the search engine views as important when assessing the user’s page experience.

The 3 metrics are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)The largest contentful paint is a measure of the render time taken for the largest visible contentful area of a page to load. – how long it takes a page to load
• First Input Delay (FID)First Input Delay measures the time between the user's initial input and when they see the result of that action on screen. – how quickly a page responds to interaction
• Cumulative Shift Layout (CLS) – tracks visual stability of a web page as it loads

Ensuring your web pages meet these 3 metrics means Google can crawl your pages more quickly with their crawl budgetA crawl budget is how often the search engine crawls your website and how much time they spend on your site. and positively impact indexing for rankings.

Enhanced User Experience

If you want people to stay on your website and navigate through your other pages, optimized images are vital to achieving this. People want instant answers and don’t like waiting, so fast page loading speeds are essential for a satisfactory user experience. Longer load times, even by a few extra seconds, are enough for someone to click off your page. Reduce these times by optimizing your images, and you can enjoy better engagement, conversions, and customer retention.

Images Require Less Storage On Your Server

Large images take up huge amounts of storage space on your server and need more bandwidth to be transferred to users’ web browsers. Reducing your image file sizes is a great way to free up server storage and reduce the bandwidth needed to transfer information. With less weight, it will also be quicker to create backups of your site, making the best use of your resources.

Tips To Optimize Images For Web

Now you know the benefits of optimizing your website imagery and the impact of not doing so, here are some image optimization best practices to follow.

Resizing Images

Image and file size are not the same. Image size relates to the dimensions of your images, whereas file size is the storage space it takes up. High-resolution images with large dimensions work well for printed material, but they must be made smaller for web use. It will be easier to resize your images if the file size is bigger, giving you more to work with without losing quality.

File Format

There are lots of file types out there, and each has a different purpose. Before reducing the size of your images, you need to know the difference between them. These are the most common image file types and what they mean:

• JPEG – The most common image file type. JPEGs provide good quality and take up less space than PNG files. They can be reduced considerably.
• PNG – PNG files work best for reducing image size while maintaining quality.
• GIF – It is not recommended to use GIF files for images. However, they are brilliant for animated graphics as they take up less space and do not slow page speeds.
• SVG – SVG files scale images to display across different devices, i.e., desktops and mobile. However, they don’t always display correctly.

Compress Image Files

When compressing file sizes, starting with a smaller one will result in lower quality. For this reason, it is best to start with a high-quality image for a greater chance of preserving this quality.

Each file type compresses differently, and you need to consider the image’s content, colors, and level of detail in an image to compress it for the web without losing quality. There are 2 types of compression: lossy and lossless.

• Lossy– Image data is stripped to create a smaller file which can impact the quality of the result. If using this type of compression, you will need an almost perfect image to start with to minimize quality loss.
• Lossless – Only removes non-essential data to compress image size and doesn’t reduce quality.

Consider File Names

For SEO purposes, you must give your image files a relevant name. Google bots crawl image file names as well as the text on your website. Be descriptive and use keywords in the name to make it easier for Google to crawl. Use hyphens between words and keep your file names lowercase to avoid confusion.

Add Alt Text

Image alt text helps search engines to understand your content. The alt tag is also used by screen readers, making websites accessible to those with visual impairments. In both cases, the alt tag tells search engines and screen readers what is in the image. It helps Google to understand the context and purpose of an image. Alt text should bring value to the user and Google. You don’t need to provide alt text for all images, for example, decorative ones. However, you do need to give an alt text for important images that illustrate a point, like an infographic.

Add Title Text

You don’t need to include title text for an image to rank. This information is only displayed when someone hovers over an image with a mouse. Most of the time, adding title text does not bring value to the user, so it doesn’t make sense to add one. If the information you want to add to a title tag is necessary, consider how to include it elsewhere.

Look At Page Title And Description

Essential on-page SEO factors like header tags, copy, structured data, page descriptions, and titles affect how Google reads and ranks your images. It is worth ensuring these are fully optimized to increase your rankings potential.

Don’t Forget Thumbnails And Other Imagery

Image thumbnails and decorative imagery like your banners, buttons, and icons can be a silent killer when it comes to making sure your website loads quickly. So, don’t forget them in your image optimization process. For thumbnails, make your files as small as possible, as they can really put a drain on loading speeds. For decorative items, it’s best to use PNG or GIF files, as these can be massively reduced in size without impacting quality.

Use Image Sitemaps

It is essential to include your optimized images in your website sitemapA site map is a list of pages on your site and their relative importance. Use sitemaps to make it easier for visitors to find what they're looking for, and to ensure that search engines can find all the information they need.. If you want your images to be crawled and indexed, include them in your sitemap. Having images crawled and indexed will boost potential traffic to your website.

Recommended Tools For Image Optimization

If you were to go through your website and optimize every image 1 by 1, it would take hours. The good news is that plenty of online tools, software, and plug-ins are available to handle the job for you! From resizing to adding alt text, these tools are definitely worth using.

Some popular tools you can use for image optimization include:

• Adobe Photoshop – Allows you to reduce file size, type, and quality for web use.
• GIMP – A free software that adjusts compression, quality, and file type.
• JPEGmini – A web app that provides lossless image compression.
• TinyPNG – A free web app that uses lossy compression for PNG and JPEG files.
• ImageRecycle – A tool that supports PNG, GIF, JPEG, and PDF files. It determines which images need optimizing on your website.
• Smush – A WordPress plug-in.
• Optimole – A plug-in on WordPress.

Conclusion

Your imagery needs to be optimized for your website to load quickly and keep Google and users happy. Fully optimized images are a crucial factor for a website’s performance. If your images aren’t optimized, you can expect Google to gloss over them, users to click away from your page, less engagement, and fewer leads.

Software and plug-ins can simplify image optimization so you can reap the benefits of fast loading speeds and enhanced user experience. If you need a helping hand to ensure your web performance is up to speed, our friendly team will be more than happy to help!