When you visit a website, you are likely to come across various visual elements, such as images, which enrich the content of the site and make it more attractive. The use of images on web pages is an effective way to convey information and capture the interest of visitors. However, if images are not optimised, they can slow down the loading time of your website and negatively affect the user experience. In this article, we'll discuss the optimisation of webpage images and how it can improve the performance of your website.
Why is image optimisation important?
Optimising images on websites means optimising the size, file size and format of images so that they take up less space and load faster. Here are some reasons why image optimisation is important:
- Faster charging time: Images can be a bottleneck to website performance if they are not optimised. Visitors expect fast loading times, and if a site loads slowly, they may give up and move on to competing sites.
- Improved user experience: Faster download times mean a better user experience. Visitors are impatient and expect to receive information immediately. Optimised images mean faster browsing and a more pleasant user experience.
- Search engine optimisation (SEO): Search engines value fast load times, and optimised images can improve your site's visibility in search engines. Search engines can index your site's content more effectively when the images used on your site are optimised.
How to optimise your website images?
When you want to optimise the images on your website, there are some important things to consider:
- Image resolution and size: Make sure you use the appropriate resolution and resize the images to the correct size for your website requirements. Often large, high-resolution images can be scaled and saved in a smaller file size without significant loss of quality.
- Select a file type: Use the correct file type for your website images. The most common file formats are JPEG, PNG, SVG. JPEG is usually the best choice for photos, while PNG is better for transparencies. SVG is used more than PNG for vector graphics. These days, it is also worth checking out the WEBP version, which reduces the image size even further and the quality remains good.
- Image packaging: Use image compression to reduce the file size. There are various image compression tools that maintain good quality at a smaller file size. Try different compression levels and find the balance between image quality and file size.
- Responsive design: Make sure your website images are responsive and adapt to different devices. Use code that automatically scales the image to different screen resolutions.
- WordPress: There are dozens of image optimization plugins for WordPress and Gingercode uses Imagify, which handles image optimization and automatically converts images to WEBP if the browser supports it.
Conclusion
Optimising your website images is an important part of improving the performance of your website and optimising the user experience. Optimised images help speed up site load times, improve user experience and promote better search engine visibility. Be sure to consider image resolution, file type, compression and responsive design when optimising your website images. Effective image optimisation will help your website stand out from the crowd and provide a better user experience for your visitors.