Why should you optimise images on your website? Imagine you have a great website with content that is optimised for search engines, but the images you use on your site are not. Harming both the load speed of the site and your ranking on Google. In this blog post, we will look at how to optimise your images for web and performance while also making them SEO-friendly.
Choosing The Right File Type
Before you start editing your photos/images to optimise images, make sure you’ve got the right file type. You have a few file kinds to pick from:
PNG – produces higher quality images, but because of that has a larger file size. This was created as a lossless image format.
JPEG – JPEG uses lossy and lossless optimisation. You can adjust the level of quality for a good balance of quality and size.
GIF – only uses 256 colours. This is the correct choice for animated images. It uses lossless compression.
There are others, such as JPEG XR and WebP, but they aren’t supported by all browsers. For images with a lot of colour, use JPEG or JPG; for simple images, use PNG.
Using Correct Titles & Alt Text
When uploading an image to your blog or website, make sure you name the file and include clear English text as the ALT text. ALT text is used when an image cannot be displayed and the ALT text is show instead to give the reader an understanding of what image was meant to be there.
This aids search engines in determining what the picture is about and can boost your search position. Be clear and informative, but don’t use too many keywords.
Use Proper Image Size And Quality
There is a maximum image size (or minimum). In most situations, smaller pictures are preferable (without sacrificing quality, of course). To guarantee faster loading times, make sure you upload photos that are the correct dimensions for your blog or website; don’t have the browser resize them. If your picture is too big, there are numerous options available online to downsize the image for you.
Add Captions To Optimise Images
Captions are an important element of search engine optimisation (SEO) that serve to verify that the page’s content is relevant to the image. Because images are more appealing than words, your website or blog visitors will be drawn to them and their accompanying captions first. If visitors can connect image with text instantly, your bounce rate will most likely decrease.
Make Sure Your Images Are Free To Use
Images on the internet are not just free use because most of them will be protected by copyright laws and not available to use without the owner of the pictures consent. To be on the safe side, always assume that images are owned and not safe to use and find specific websites that allow you to use there images. Make sure to always read the fine print!
Serving Your Images
How you provide your pictures to your visitors, while not strictly optimising them, may have a significant impact on page load time.
Bloggers commonly offer their photos straight from their hosting account, which is usually sufficient. However, if you want to get the most out of your site, consider uploading it on a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN is a worldwide network of web servers that are strategically positioned in data centres all over the world. Furthermore, these servers store multiple duplicates of your pictures and serve them to clients’ browsers upon request. The CDN redirects visitors’ browsers to a server located as near as physically possible to them. For example people in the UK will receive UK based servers. Where as US visitors which be sent to a US server.
Make Sure Your Image Are Mobile Friendly
Making sure your image is mobile friendly is very important. Google will punish your ranking if the website is not considered mobile friendly and having images that look correct on mobile is part of that. Make sure images are not stretched, losing too much quality and getting pixelated.
With the average web page increasing in size year on year, you should really be optimising your images. Even though its 2021, not all your customers will be on high speed connections and slow loading speeds will hurt your Google ranking and frustrate customers. Get into the habit of optimising images as you upload them to avoid any issues.
Need help with images on your website? Check out our website section
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