5 Big Reasons Why Image Optimization is Essential for Your Website
We’ve all attempted to browse through a super slow website at least once in our life. The images take forever to load; the writings don’t appear… it’s the worldwide wait. And because people prefer fast and snappy websites, it’s time to reach the rock bottom of the problem if you own a forever-loading website.
Your website isn’t a once-and-done thing. It needs to evolve, update, and grow with technology and user experience transformation. Usually, the images you put up can significantly impact your website performance.
The images account for the majority of the data to be loaded. Because images carry a significant performance of what’s loading, optimizing images is one of the first things to do for faster websites.
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is a technique to compress website visuals without hampering the quality. It means delivering the best picture quality in the correct format and dimension while keeping the size minimum.
When you optimize images, you’re reducing page load time and boosting site speed. Even if it’s just for a few milliseconds, it could create all the differences between gaining and losing countless visitors.
It’s necessary to keep your file sizes low when optimizing images. However, you want to avoid ending up with fuzzy or grainy visuals, especially in the days of high-resolution screens. Knowing which software best resizes your images can do the trick.
For instance, the AI-powered autoRetouch can automatically resize photos without any complicated process. Set the dimensions on the tool, and the software will generate rescaled high-quality images in a few seconds. The software mainly works with the lossless compression technique and won’t distort your pictures.
Why optimize images for websites?
Even if image optimization isn’t a high priority on your list now, it matters and should be done if you own a website. Here’s why you should consider optimizing images:
- Improve page speed:
Images are heavy pieces of content. Without optimization, they will definitely slow down your website and cause loading issues. Most visitors expect your website to load fast. In fact, you have about 2 seconds to get websites to load fast before the visitor is ready to move on. Because people prefer faster sites, it’s also important to Google. Google works hard to improve things that are meaningful for visitors.
2. Improves SEO ranking:
Google hates slow websites like its users. In 2010, it became clear that page speed is a ranking factor. Good and unoptimized images can slow down the speed of your website. Unless you optimize the photos, all your SEO efforts will fail. Google doesn’t rank slow websites; sometimes, it may even remove your website.
3. Enhance user experience:
A happy customer is not a myth. Optimizing images also allows you to enhance your website experience. Optimized images have proper titles and alt texts, which both screen readers and search engines use to understand what your picture is about. Not only optimized images favor user experience, but they also benefit your on-page SEO.
4. Boost conversions:
Page load speed is directly linked to SEO ranking and conversions. If your rankings improve on the search engine, you are likely to get more traffic on your website, which ultimately leads to more conversion.
5. Complements other SEO efforts:
Image optimization also helps to supplement your SEO efforts. Well-optimized images have a better chance of appearing in the image carousels of the search engine. The right combination of size, format, title text, alt text, and more give your images a better opportunity to build your brand identity. A page with well-written content and optimized images can get social shares and gain backlinks from highly authoritative websites.
Conclusion:
Image optimization is a critical element for your SEO strategy. The better optimized your photos are, the faster your website. And yes, Google will like you better too!
