As a business website owner, you most likely invested a lot of time in designing a beautiful website with powerful and meaningful images. As such, you are eager to show your stunning photos to the world. It can be product or project photo's or even illustrations that match the services you provide. Images are used to show expertise, to send out a message or to transmit a feeling.
However, the actual pictures that you took are often not the ones that finally get to your website, as a lot of cute pixels are left out along the way. If all of these pixels manage to get to your website, the images might be too heavy and it would take ages to load them on your webpage. The biggest dilemma of website owners is how to preserve the best quality in their photos without harming their page load speed and the performance of the website as a whole.
The importance of image optimization
When surfing across the internet, your computer literary downloads every element on a website to display it on your screen. Therefore, the bigger the website component, the longer it takes to load the site. A website with a slow performance generally hurts search engine optimization for your website as well as it reduces the user experience (UX). Note that website users love a site that loads fast, and about 40% of the users are said to abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The Google mobile-first indexing is also a key factor to consider as more than 50% of the internet traffic is generated through mobile phones. Understand that the bandwidth of your mobile phone is often slower. That's why you need to find the right balance between high-resolution images and the performance of your website.
How to optimize your images
There are two ways to optimize your images.
1. Compression
The image compression principle can be extremely complex mathematically. While compressing your images software will recognize the redundant information from your images and cut it down.
The major disadvantage of compressing your images is that it cuts off valuable elements of your images. The average person will hardly notice these changes, but for you, as the image creator, might feel overwhelmed by the finer details that go disappear from your valuable photos. You might tend to reason like, why spend all that precious time and creativity when the compression algorithm ruins it in a blink of an eye? So try to find balance and test different compressed image sizes until you find a result that makes your product shine without compromising the loading speed of your website.
2. Resize your images
Today, technological improvements let us to take images with a very high resolution. However, images with high resolution take considerable time to upload, load in real time on a webpage, and download. Therefore, resizing your images is essential in optimizing your image load speed for the Google search engine. Resizing can help you change the size of your images without altering the quality too much. Your users will see the exact same thing on your website, but a smaller image in format.
Resizing your images is a great technique to provide quality images, but it is not always convincing. Sometimes you just need larger images in order to display important details or to blow away your website visitors with a full width image banner.
Best practices in choosing the right quality of your images
When it comes to optimizing your website images, it is all about finding the right balance. You need to showcase quality images as well as optimize your page speed for efficient website performance. But, compressing and resizing your images is not always a better option as they limit the visual appearance of the image for the sake of performance.
Our automatic image resize tool works in real time on your website. So our clients don't need to worry about the image size or image quality.
We will let you upload files up to 15mb and make sure that they are hosted on a server which preloads them to a size that fits the needs of the devices that you are viewing them on. Always the right quality, from a mobile phone to a computer or a 4k TV without compromising the speed of your web pages or your image quality.
We are sure that you now how to optimize your images so they perform at their best on your website. Do not hesitate to contact our team if you have any additional questions.