Revaluation is essential in all of your life’s decisions (ER, 2020). Nowadays, businesses must maintain a quick-loading eCommerce website to keep the client experience moving in today’s immediate gratification society. According to research, customers are less likely to purchase from an e-commerce site if it loads more slowly than anticipated. Large, poorly optimized photos are frequently the main causes of a slow website.
Even though high-quality images are crucial for exceptional product photography, image optimization is the real key to having a profitable online store. Learning picture optimization techniques can pay off handsomely by speeding up websites, boosting your brand, and luring customers who are looking through Google images.
Image optimization – what is it?
Image optimization is minimizing the size of your photos’ files without compromising their quality to keep your page load times as quick as feasible. Getting your banner and product photos to rank highly on Google and other image search engines is another aspect of image SEO.
Image optimization aims to produce high-quality photographs with the smallest possible file size. Here, three key components are involved:
- Image file size (JPEG vs. PNG vs. WEBP images)
- Image compression level
- Image height and width
You can decrease the size of the image and enhance website performance by striking a balance between the three.
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How to make photos more web-friendly
1. Make clear, direct image names
Keeping the default file names that your camera provides when you post photographs to your website is quite simple. However, including pertinent keywords will help your website rank on search engines when it comes to image SEO.
For images to be optimized, descriptive, keyword-rich file names must be created. Search engines read both the content and the file names of the images on your website.
2. Ensure that your alt attributes are optimized.
When a browser is unable to properly render pictures, alt attributes serve as a text substitute. They are employed for web accessibility as well. If you hover your mouse over an image, the alt attribute text will be visible even after it has been produced (depending on your browser settings).
Your website’s alt property improves its SEO value. You can improve your search engine ranking by giving the photos on your website adequate alt attributes that contain pertinent keywords. Using alt attributes is likely the greatest method to ensure that your e-commerce products appear in Google images and web search results.
3. Make intelligent decisions on image size and product angles.
It’s customary to display your merchandise from a variety of perspectives. If you’re attempting to market the Ford Mustang, for example, you wouldn’t want to exhibit it in just one picture. It would be nice if you could display images of:
- The interior
- The rear
- The rims
- The engine
4. resize the pictures
Think about this:
- Consumers won’t wait even three seconds for an e-commerce site to load for close to 50% of consumers.
- The average page load time is getting longer globally.
- Amazon discovered that it would lose $1.6 billion annually if its pages loaded a second slower.
- The speed at which a page load is one of the ranking factors used by Google.
If your photographs take longer than 15 seconds to load and “drool” down the screen, what should I do? Well, you may bid that potential client farewell!
5. Select the appropriate image format.
JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the three most popular file types used to upload photos to the web.
JPEG (or.jpg) The de facto preferred picture file format for the web is JPEG (or.jpg). JPEG photos can be significantly compressed, producing high-quality images with tiny file sizes. The JPEG format in the image above allows for acceptable quality at a little file size.
GIF (.gif) images are used for simpler images like icons and ornamental images and are of lesser quality than JPEG images. GIFs can also be animated.
GIFs are losing ground to PNG images in terms of popularity. Compared to GIFs, PNGs support a lot more colors, and they don’t degrade over time with repeated saves as JPEGs do. Even while PNG files are beginning to be used more frequently, they can still have substantially greater file sizes than JPEG pictures.
PNG Take note of how the PNG-24 image has a file size that is more than three times that of the PNG-8 image. This is why using PNGs requires extreme caution.
6. Make your thumbnails better
Thumbnail photos are commonly used on e-commerce websites, particularly on category pages. They quickly display things without consuming a lot of space.
Thumbnails are fantastic, but use caution—they can murder you quietly. the victim Your webpage loads quickly. Typically, thumbnails are displayed at pivotal times during the shopping experience. You can lose a potential consumer if they are slowing down the loading of your category pages.
7. Use image sitemaps
Image sitemaps will assist in getting your images recognized by Google if your website uses Javascript galleries, image pop-ups, or other “flashy” methods to enhance the overall shopping experience (Hayes, 2022).
Images that are not directly referenced in the source code of the webpage cannot be crawled by web crawlers. Therefore, you must include a location for unidentified photos on an image sitemap to inform crawlers about them.
8. Avoid using fancy images.
Websites frequently contain a variety of ornamental images, including backgrounds, buttons, and borders. Any graphic that isn’t directly tied to a product is probably considered ornamental.
Even having ornamental images can greatly enhance a web page’s aesthetic appeal, they might cause a big total file size and sluggish load times. As a result, you might want to think about looking more closely at your decorative photos to ensure that they won’t hinder the potential of your website to convert visitors into consumers.
Use a template that reduces file sizes and make sure to verify the file sizes of all the ornamental images on your website.
9. Use content delivery networks with care (CDNs)
Since we are a hosted service, Shopify merchants don’t need to worry about this, but others should take note. One of the most popular places to host photos and other media files is a content delivery network (CDN). They can speed up website load times and assist with bandwidth problems.
When it comes to backlinks, there is only one negative. Backlinks are important for SEO, as you may well know, and the more backlinks your site of gpa calculator online has, the better it will rank in the search engines.
10. Check your pictures
Increasing your bottom line is the sole goal of image optimization. We’ve discussed optimizing file sizes and getting search engines to index your photographs, but what about experimenting with different images to discover which ones generate more sales?
A page’s product image count is being tested. You might discover that decreasing the number of photos on a page will enhance click-through rates and sales because load times are a problem for some non-hosted e-commerce sites. Additionally, having numerous photos on each page will likely enhance user experience and increase sales. Testing it is the only way to learn this.
Analyze which angles your clients like best. By offering the views that your customers want to see, you might experience a boost in customer loyalty. Asking your consumers what they loved best about your product photos is an excellent way to learn this information. In general, surveying and conversing with your clients is an excellent habit to develop. Still, confirm by testing.
Test the ideal number of product listings for category pages. 10, 20, or 100 items? To find out what works best for your customers, experiment with the number of products you list on category pages.
References
Mark Hayes (2022). 10 Image Optimization Tips for Your Ecommerce Website. https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips
ER (2020). How to Make Progress on Your Goals When You Feel Unmotivated? https://eazyresearch.com/blog/how-to-make-progress-on-your-goals-when-you-feel-unmotivated/