What is the Importance of Image Optimization?
In a world of instant gratification, it is essential for businesses to maintain a fast loading experience for customers on their e-commerce sites. Research indicates that if an e-commerce site loads slower than expected, visitors are less likely to make a purchase. Large, unoptimized images are often the primary reason for slow sites.
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization involves reducing the file size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality, so that page loading times remain low. It is also about optimizing the images for search engines, meaning getting your banner and product images to rank highly on Google and other search engines. Image optimization ensures your images look perfect on desktop and mobile devices and do not hinder web performance.
What is the Goal of Image Optimization?
The goal of image optimization is to create high-quality images at the smallest file size. Three main elements play a role in this: the image file size, the level of image compression, and the height and width of the image. By finding a balance between these three elements, you can reduce image size and improve site performance.
Why Do We Need Image Optimization?
Images are the largest contributor to overall page size, causing pages to load slowly. Data from HTTP Archive reveals that unoptimized images account for 75% of the total weight of a web page, on average. This can negatively impact your website’s performance.
Benefits of Image Optimization
Optimizing images for the web and mobile devices aims to make web pages load faster. It creates a better browsing experience for shoppers. If there is even a slight delay of more than two seconds in page speed, the bounce rate can increase by 103%. Page speed refers to how quickly the content on your page loads. It is often described as follows: page load time, or the time it takes to display content on a page. And time to first byte, which is the number of milliseconds it takes your browser to receive the first byte of information from your web server.
Improving Browsing Experience
Page speed is important for visitor experience. People can detect delays even at one-tenth of a second. Anything longer than that does not feel instant. A single second is enough to disrupt a person’s thought process. The BBC found that with each additional second of page load time, 10% of users will leave.
Improving Search Performance
Optimized images help your website to be better understood by readers and search engines, making your content more visible online. Recent data indicates that images appear in 32% of search queries on Google. Optimizing images can help rank your images in Google image search, potentially bringing more traffic to your website and boosting your brand.
How to Optimize Images for the Web
1. Use clear and direct image names: Relevant keywords should be used to help your page rank in search engines.
2. Carefully optimize alt attributes: Proper alt attributes can help improve your ranking in search engines.
3. Choose image dimensions and product angles wisely: Image dimensions and product angles should be chosen to enhance user experience and help improve your image rankings in search engines.
4. Resize images: Image file sizes can be resized to improve page load speed.
5. Choose the right image format: The appropriate image format should be selected based on the type of image, its quality, and its size.
6.
Improve thumbnail images: Thumbnail file sizes should be optimized to enhance page loading speed.
7. Use image sitemaps: Image sitemaps can be used to make search engines notice the images on your site.
8. Be cautious with decorative images: Check the file sizes of decorative images and use templates that reduce file sizes.
9. Use content delivery networks cautiously: Be careful when using content delivery networks, as they may affect your site’s rankings in search engines.
10. Test your images: Images should be tested to find out which ones convert more customers.
Image Optimization Tools
Now that you know some best practices for image optimization, let’s take a look at some image optimization tools and plugins you can use for your website.
AVADA SEO: Image Optimizer
This app is one of the best applications in the Shopify store. It saves time and effort in optimizing images for your store. You can optimize images with just one click using AVADA.
TinyIMG SEO, Speed & Image Optimizer
This other tool is a fantastic optimization tool for Shopify store owners. It can automatically optimize images and upload them to your store.
TinyPNG
This is the most popular image optimization tool on the web. It can intelligently reduce the file sizes of your page images.
Maintaining Image Functionality with Image Optimization
Now you have learned about some image optimization strategies to make your product images appear in Google image search results. You also learned how to make the most of alt attributes and the difference between file types and when to choose each option. Now it’s time to go to your website and start optimizing your images.
Frequently Asked Questions About Image Optimization
What does image optimization mean? Image optimization is the process of making images look perfect on desktops and mobile devices. It works by using compression techniques, such as lossy and lossless compression, to reduce file size without losing any image quality.
What are the benefits of image optimization? Image optimization helps to improve site speed, enhance browsing experience, and boost search performance.
What are the techniques for image optimization? Image optimization techniques include using clear and straightforward image names, optimizing alt attributes, wisely choosing image dimensions and product angles, resizing images, selecting the appropriate format, optimizing thumbnail images, and using image sitemaps.
What is the best tool for image optimization? If you are a Shopify store owner, AVADA SEO: Image Optimizer and TinyIMG SEO, Speed & Image Optimizer are the best image optimization tools. TinyPNG is the best tool for general image optimization use.
Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips
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