Did you know that 53% of mobile site visitors abandon a website if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load? So optimising your images is a must if you want your website to stand out in terms of making your site load faster, look better, and even climb higher in search engine rankings. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the process of optimising images effectively.
What is Image Optimisation?
Image optimisation is all about reducing an image’s file size without compromising its quality. This means choosing the right format, compressing and resizing to make sure your images load quickly and look great.
Optimised images can assist in a smooth user experience, improving website performance, and contributes to better search engine optimisation (SEO).
How to Optimise Images for Your Website?
Step 1: Download the Image to Your Computer
You can upload images straight from your phone, but resizing them is generally a bit easier on a computer. To get your photo from your phone to your computer:
- Email the photo to yourself, then download it on your computer.
Use a cloud service like Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox etc. to transfer the image. - Once you have your image, you can learn how to turn your images into awesome visuals here.
Step 2: Resize Your Images for Faster Loading
Why resize? Because uploading a 10MB image to your website is like showing up to a casual coffee in a tuxedo—it’s overkill! Large images, even if compressed, will slow down your website if they are unnecessarily big.
Best Image Dimensions for Website:
It is best to aim for images that are no wider than 1920px for full-width images, and smaller dimensions (800px to 1200px) for in-page images. This way, it’s big enough to look great, but not so big that it will slow your site down, image sizes also should vary depending on where you intend to place the image on the site, a general size rule of thumb to keep in mind is:
- Logo Image – 200 x 100px
- Thumbnail Image – 150 x 150px
- Product Image – 1000 x 1000px
- Featured Image – 1200 x 800px
- Background / Banner image – 1920 x 1080px
Online Image Resizing Tools
There are plenty of online tools for resizing images. If you’re after a simple, free, browser-based solution (no software needed), we often use:
- Adobe – Allows you to easily resize your images in one click, changing the dimensions of any image.
- Image Resizer – It works on any platform and allows your image to easily be resized to your preferred size.
Mobile Apps for Resizing on the Go
If you need to resize images directly from your smartphone, there are plenty of apps available with various features and price points. We typically use mobile apps such as:
- Picsart – Allows you to resize your photos in seconds with Picsart’s Image Resizer tool. Redefine and repurpose your images without losing quality.
- Adobe Lightroom – This platform allows you to crop single or bulk photos to a fixed size and output them at a certain set of pixel dimensions to create the highest image quality.
Step 3: Compress Your Images
Even after resizing, your image might still need a little optimisation, this is called compressing your image, which is one of the easiest and most effective ways to reduce the file size without losing quality.
Similar to resizing, there are tons of handy online tools available online like Image Resizer and TinyPNG for quick fixes, or you can use specific plugins for your website / CMS.
If you’d like some extra help with bulk resizing or want to learn more about how SEO and image optimisation can benefit your organisation, chat to our team today!
Step 4: Upload Your Optimised Images to WordPress
You’re ready to show the world your resized and optimised image. Here’s how you can do this on WordPress:
- Log into your WordPress dashboard.
- Navigate to Media
- From your computer, drag and drop your image into the media gallery
Why Should You Optimise Images for Your Website?
There are several reasons why you should optimise images for your website:
Improves Website Speed:
Before uploading images to your CMS (website), it is always recommended to compress them, as large, unoptimised images can drastically reduce loading speeds, leading to poor user experiences. Ideally, a page should load in 0-3 seconds—anything longer puts you at risk of losing visitors.
Here’s a fun exercise: look at your phone or computer and count to 10. Now imagine waiting that long for a page to load. Would you refresh? Leave and try again later? Or head somewhere else to find what you’re looking for?
Enhances Mobile Experience:
Optimised images ensure fast loading times, which is crucial as mobile traffic continues to grow and users become more accustomed to expect instant results.
Minimises Data Usage:
By reducing image file sizes, you conserve bandwidth, which is important for users with slower internet connections or limited data plans.
Boosts SEO:
An added bonus of doing this is that search engines like Google love speedy websites! So, by optimising your images, your website will load faster, which can give your SEO rankings a nice boost. A faster site not only makes visitors happy, but it also helps reduce bounce rates and increases the chances of them sticking around and engaging.
Conclusion
By resizing and optimising your images before uploading, you’re not only making your website look polished and professional, but you’re also improving your SEO. So, next time you’re about to post that picture, you now know exactly how to make it web-ready! If you’re interested in learning more about how SEO or image optimisation could benefit your organisation, contact our team on 1300 131 932.
