Surely you’ve heard that famous phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words,” and when it comes to the digital world and the performance of today’s websites and their SEO, that phrase is absolutely right. There is no point in having a perfectly developed website with well-written articles and a striking appearance if the images uploaded on it are poorly optimized. Images that are not optimized will slow down your website load time, seriously damaging the website’s growth spoiling all your SEO strategies. Website image optimization is very important!
The solution to this problem? Optimize your images for SEO. This process isn’t challenging, but it does take time. Many website owners have become frustrated because of low website ranking due to failures like this one. When images are correctly optimized, they will become powerful SEO tools and progress quickly in the virtual world.
According to the results of several surveys carried out among regular Internet users, the average waiting time that a person tolerates for a website does not exceed 3 seconds. The websites that take more than 3 seconds to load and properly display their contents and images will end up being discarded. Does it seem unfair to you? Maybe it is, but in an increasingly digitalized world, time is money, and only those who know how to make the most of the available online resources will be able to enjoy the success they are so eager for.
Do you need more information about this process and its influence on web development? Well, here goes: more than 60% of the total weight of a web page is made up of all the images that make it up. So, if more than half of the weight of my website depends on the pictures I upload and not on the text I publish, don’t you think it’s worthwhile to find out how to improve its loading time while keeping a good quality image that will make the user experience even more satisfactory? Of course, I do.
For all this, we will help you understand the process of optimization of web images, explaining to you its operation and meaning, its advantages for the SEO of your website, and some ways to carry it out.
Let’s get started!
What is the web image optimization process?
As its name indicates and based on the fact that the term optimization means “to improve something, to make it go faster,” the web image optimization process is a simple way to reduce the weight of the images that are uploaded to a website so that the loading time of the primary and secondary pages is drastically reduced, while trying to maintain an optimum quality level for all of them.
On the other hand, this optimization process also seeks to improve the website’s SEO position in the main search engines, such as Google or Bing, since the faster the web pages load, the more visits they usually accumulate, causing their position in the results grid to rise in line with their popularity gradually. This is the main reason why most business owners who decide to invest in a website in the long term look for professional advice on web design and development, avoiding their pages to fall into oblivion and their monetary investment being useless.
Web image optimization is essential in a website’s SEO strategy, so it is worth investing time and money to improve this aspect. Don’t forget, bet on optimization, and you will come out winning.
Benefits of Image Optimization
Improve your SEO ranking
A decade ago, after several meetings and discussions on the subject of SEO positioning of web pages among the leading search engines, Google determined that they would value the speed of web pages and their loading time to rank them since they considered that as most users do today, only those websites capable of offering a fast and quality experience should be among the top positions in the ranking.
Therefore, based on these statements and the constant need of the world’s population to obtain the information they are looking for in a fast and accurate way, carrying out an optimization of your website’s images will bring you great benefits and will make the giants of the industry look at you with good eyes and compensate you with better search ranking.
Increase Page Loading Speed
As we have explained throughout this post, the main benefit of optimizing images on your website is to reduce the loading time of all your pages. This optimizing tactic is done by reducing the weight of all the images without losing their quality. Suppose more than 60% of a website’s total weight, whatever type it is, is made up of your photos (whether they are high-quality photographs, such as decorations or logos). In that case, it is logical that by optimizing your images, your page loading speed will increase. Consequently, your page’s quality will increase at the same time as its popularity among the SERPs.
Do you not know how to carry out this optimization, or are you afraid of not doing it correctly? Don’t worry, because there are many online tools that will help you in this, such as Web Page Test or PageSpeed Insights from Google, both highly recognized and easy to understand the user.
Increase Your Number of Conversions
If you have a website dedicated to the sale of products, you will be interested to know that those websites that have a better SEO positioning & also enjoy a higher percentage of monthly conversions on their website. It has been more than proved that the higher the users’ level of satisfaction, the higher the number of conversions they carry out in this place, causing other people to visit it and gradually increasing its popularity.
Studies don’t lie, and they tell us that more than 75% of buyers who were satisfied with the look and speed of a website end up buying something from it again. Therefore, not only will it allow you to gain popularity among users, but it will also benefit you in the short and long term in your economic benefits. It’s an advantage worth studying, don’t you think?
Ways to Optimize Your Website’s Images
Name Your Images With Short Keywords
The first way to carry out image optimization is to use popular keywords in all your image files. Search engines not only analyze the number of keywords used in the body text, but they also analyze the names of all the images uploaded to that same page. So take the time and rename all your website images and remove the long serial names that the cameras give them. Instead, use a variety of keywords describing the picture.
Resize Your Images Correctly and Use Their Features
One of the easiest ways to carry out an image optimization is to resize all the images, adapting them to the desired location’s width and length without losing quality. Try to strategically add photographs of the product; if we are going to promote a coffee machine, we should use a primary picture of the whole product while adding others from other angles so that other essential features are better seen.
You may think that adding several images instead of using one is not optimizing, but the truth is that if we use short descriptions with keywords in each of these small images, we will be carrying out an image SEO since search engines will take users directly to that photograph in question by analyzing the keyword and will position you ahead of other less specific pages. But remember, do not go overboard and add too many images because the more images the website has to load, the longer the load time.
Reduce The Size of The Images
It is imperative that you reduce the size of all the images on your website properly so that their loading time is reduced. However, not everyone knows how to carry out this process and it ends up spoiling your images and turning them into small blurry images with no value. The best way to prevent this from happening is by using special programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, or free options such as Gimp or Paint.net. These programs have a powerful and precise tool that will help you resize your images little by little and maintain their high definition.
Use The Right Format for Each Image
Once you have your images resized and with a proper name and description, the next thing you will have to check is that they are in a format suitable for a web page since not all formats are equally valid or have the same weight. The best formats to carry out your SEO image optimization are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. In terms of weight, the JPEG and GIF formats have an average size of 30 kb, while the PNG is 35 kb.
In any case, the more images in this format you can upload, the faster your website will load and the better your SEO results will be overall. So don’t forget to check all your formats before uploading your images to make sure they don’t weigh too much and slow down your whole website.
Once you’ve optimized your images for better performance, your site will be better liked by search engines and will load faster for your website users.
Web Image Optimization Conclusion
Have you optimized your images for better performance? Do you need help? Contact us with your questions! Please share your thoughts, your techniques, and best practices in the comments below!
