We all know pictures hold the power to convey thousands of words at once. That’s why it is very important for any website to add attractive and useful images. And it becomes a must for ecommerce websites as it is not feasible for customers to pick, touch, or inspect the product online; thus, they can only rely on the available image. By exploring the pictures, they will get to know about the color, quality, and characteristics of the products.
The e-commerce website owners must learn the art of image optimisation as it will affect the attitude and response of users. But having bulky images on websites may lead to a higher time of page loading. Nowadays, people do not have more patience; thus, your website should load in two seconds or less than this time. And one of the most common steps for this is to optimise the images present on your website.
What Is Image Optimisation?
Image optimisation is the process of converting large files into the possible smallest size without compromising the quality of the image. It might sound a little tricky to you, but actually, it is very simple. There are many plugins and tools available that easily compress the images upto 70 to 80 % without doing any change in the image quality.
You can get a clear idea by looking at these two images.
Importance Of Optimising The Image For The Web And Its Benefits
There are several benefits of optimising the images for the web. Below we are providing some of the top benefits that you should acknowledge.
- Image optimisation improves the page loading speed. No visitor will love to stay on such a webpage that takes more time to load. They will definitely move to your competitors. You should optimise your website so that visitors don’t experience any delay in web loading.
- It is useful in improving the SEO of the website. The improvement in the ranking of the website will be visible with optimised images. The presence of large files on the websites slows it down, and all search engines hate such websites.
- You can create the backup of the website fastly with well-optimised websites.
- Also, the small-sized file utilizes less bandwidth, and it is much appreciated by the browsers and networks you are using.
- It is most obvious that small images would take less space on servers; thus, it is a good practice that you should optimise the images.
- Images on your website are responsible for keeping users engaged, and if it loads faster, users will love to spend more time on your website.
Process To Optimise The Images For The Web
You can follow a step-by-step guide to do image optimisation for web pages.
1. Naming Of Image In Descriptive Manner And In Plain Text
It is the common habit of most users that they choose the default name for the image that their camera assigns. But from the perspective of SEO, it is good to use the relevant keywords in the image description that will help you in improving the search engine ranking. The creative and descriptive keywords are effective in improving the web page ranking. Search engines not only check the content of your webpage but also crawl the file names used for images.
For example, for this image, your camera may assign DCMIMAGE11.jpg, but it would be much better that you name it as Process-To-Optimise-The-Images-For-The-Web.jpg
You can check out the website analytics to determine the keywords pattern followed by your customers. Select the most common one and apply it to the image file name process.
2. Optimising Alt Attribute Of The Image
The alternative text is used for describing the image; when the browser is not able to display it properly. It should be easy from the perspective of web accessibility. Also, when the image is not loading and any user hovers over the image, then alt text will appear, and the user will get an idea about what this image is. It adds SEO value to the web pages. Using appropriate alt attributes with relevant keywords helps in ranking better in search engine results. It is the best way to acknowledge your ecommerce products to Google and other web engines.
It would be best if you prioritize filling out each alt attribute of every product image so that optimisation can be done better.
You Should Follow Some Of The Rules For Filling Alt Attributes.
- Always describe the name of an image in plain language.
- You can use model numbers and serial numbers of the product in alt attributes.
- Don’t try to stuff all the keywords in the alt attribute.
- Also, you should consider that search engines can penalize your web page for over decorating the alt attributes of the images.
3. Choosing The Correct Dimension Of Image
It is useful for users to offer multiple side views of the product so that users can get the right knowledge about the product. You can not show the complete look of the product in a single image, especially when you are aiming to sell it. It would be best that you offer the inner, rear, and front sides of the image. Adding a description to the base of the alt attribute is effective in appearing in the searcher’s result. Also, if you do extra work for your web page, then Google will also reward you with multiple searchers.
You should not use large images on your website for a better user experience. Most of the website owners place larger view images on their website and shrink their images with code. But in reality, this process increases the website’s load time as there is a larger file present with the image. However, you should use the small size images and offer the option to view them in a larger mode in pop-up or other windows. You can learn this process from the internet.
4. Reducing The Size Of The Image File
There is very much importance of page load time in the Google algorithm for ranking the websites. Most of the users, including us, don’t wait for more than 3 seconds to load any website, and globally the page loading time of the websites is increasing. Also recently, Amazon has said that if their web page loads slowly, then on average, there will be a loss of nearly $1.5 billion a year.
So if your website is also one that takes nearly 15 to 20 seconds to load, then users will not think a single second to say goodbye to your website. So what do you have to do?
As soon as the customer arrives on your website, the website starts loading. And if there is a large file associated with that, then it will take longer than the usual time to load. So you have to decrease the size of the image file so that page loading time can increase. There is also one way by which you can reduce the file size, and that is- “save for web” option of Adobe Photoshop. With this, you can adjust the image file size to the lowest possible size and also without compromising with quality. Besides Adobe Photoshop, there are also some good tools that you can check out.
PicMonkey, Canva, PIXLR, and many more. And one should not forget about GIMP. It is an open-source tool that offers you the ease of editing your photos freely. It is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux.
5. Selecting The Correct Format Of File
We all know there are three common file types that are used for posting images to the web. JPEG, GIF, and PNG all differently affect the same image. So let us learn one by one.
JPEG
It is one of the old formats of the image file. Nowadays, it has become the standard file type for images over the internet. Therefore, you can easily compress the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) types of images. This gives you the freedom to get small-size images of good quality.
GIF
Its extension is .gif, and images are a little less in quality as compared to the JPEG file type. They are mostly used for icons and decorative images. They are good with animation too.
PNG
At the current time, PNG images are becoming more popular than GIFs. And they remain good with quality, just like JPEG images. Also, they offer more color options than GIFs. The file size of PNG images can be much larger than the JPEG images.
You Should Remember Some Points While Selecting The File Type.
- For e-commerce purposes, JPEGs are the best companion. It is because you will receive the best quality for the smallest image file.
- Try to avoid GIFs for larger product images. Because once the size of the image becomes large, you will be left with no way to reduce the size.
- It will be a good alternative to go with the PNGs as it fulfills both JPEG and GIFs requirements. Also, try to use PNG-8 over PNG-24.
Conclusion
If you are not using optimised images for your website, you should start trying as it has a good impact on the page loading speed. You will see a difference in site speed by optimising the images for the web. And users will definitely love it. Along with users, Search Engines also loves it.
If you want to experience a better rank for your website with the better loading time, then contact the professionals of Marketing Sweets. We have years of experience in improving the SEO of the website. We use the best techniques and tools to optimise the images for the web.
Feel free to ask us any questions by contacting us at 08 8337 4340.
