How Image Optimisation impacts Website Performance
Michael Janamian 🌟 Sydney 𝗪𝗲𝗯𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗻 Agency 🌟
Website Design Agency 🚀 That 𝗚𝗿𝗼𝘄𝘀 💹 𝗕𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘀 🏛️ Via 𝗗𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 💸
Images play a big role on your business website in capturing and engaging with your audiences. Thanks to images, one can easily interpret and understand what a website is all about.
Images have many purposes: from making websites more visually appealing, to accompanying articles, to advertisements, to product and service depictions, as well as being simply conveying a message on social media.
According to studies, people recall 80% of what they see and just 20% of what they read. According to research, 65% of individuals are visual learners. It’s also been shown that the human brain can deal with images in as little as 13 milliseconds.
These, as well as several other statistics, suggest that photographs are powerful vehicles for expression. Perhaps their most essential quality is that they break down language barriers, since everyone on the planet understands them. Thus, there is no denying that investing in the right types of images for your website can help in generating and sustaining organic traffic to your website.
But what comes next after this knowledge? The next thing to do is to optimise your images for search engine results.
Introduction
SEO image optimisation is the process of improving the visibility and ranking of images on search engines, with the goal of generating more web traffic. This can be accomplished through optimising the file name, alternate text, caption, and description of the image. Additionally, using compression tools can reduce the size of your images, making them load faster on web pages. When optimising your images for SEO, keep in mind that Google’s algorithms favour high-quality images that are relevant to the user’s search query.
Google also looks at the quality of an image when determining its position in the search results. To earn a high ranking, your images should be clear and concise, without any unnecessary clutter. They should also be properly sized for the web page on which they will appear. If your images are too small, they may not be visible to users, and if they’re too large, they will take longer to load.
Most businesses undermine the value of images, optimising the images for better website performance and lead generation can be super powerful for any business? Continue reading on to learn more.
Table of Contents
What is Image Optimisation?
Image optimisation is the process of reducing the size of an image file without compromising its quality. Image optimisation involves finding the right balance between file size and quality so that your images load quickly on web pages while still being clear and crisp.
The goal of web image optimisation is to deliver high-quality images, in the right format and resolution, while keeping them as small as possible. This is important because large image files can slow down your website, which can frustrate users and hurt your search engine ranking.
There are two main types of image optimisation: lossless and lossy. With lossless optimisation, no data is lost when the file is compressed. This means that the quality of the image remains unchanged, but the file size is reduced. Lossy compression, on the other hand, involves some data loss. The trade-off here is that you can achieve a much smaller file size, but at the expense of some image quality.
The type of compression you choose will depend on several factors, including the type of image (photograph or graphic), how it will be used (on a website or in print), and the level of quality you need.
Importance of Images in a Website
Your website’s images have a lot more to accomplish than just making your design appear nice.
If you post pictures on your website that entice customers, you will see a drastic uptick in traffic and conversions. Keep reading to find out why images are so important for business websites:
Images Make a Website Appear More Professional
A picture is worth a thousand words, and this adage is especially true when it comes to website design. Your site’s visuals play a significant role in its overall professionalism. Customers will immediately judge your business by the look of your site, so it’s important to make sure that everything looks top-notch.
If you want potential customers to take your business seriously, you need to use high-quality images on your website. Avoid using stock photos whenever possible – instead, opt for original pictures that reflect your brand identity. Professional photography conveys to customers that you’re serious about what you do and that you’re willing to invest in quality content.
In addition to making your website look more professional, using high-quality images will also help you build trust with potential customers. In today’s digital age, it can be difficult to gain someone’s trust online. By using high-quality images, you’ll be able to show potential customers that you’re a credible source of information.
It would be ideal to check and audit your existing images to be able to determine which online image needs to be replaced, updated, and adjusted to fit in with the branding of the website.
Image Optimisation Help You Rank Higher in Search Results
In addition to making your website look more professional, using images can also help you rank higher in search results. Whenever you write a blog post or create a new page on your website, be sure to include at least one relevant image.
Not only will this make your content more visually appealing, but it will also help you rank higher in search results. Google’s algorithm favours sites that use multimedia, so including images in your content is a great way to improve your SEO. It is important to optimise images, regardless whether they are jpeg and png images. Optimising images makes a visually appealing image ideal for search engine rankings.
When you’re selecting images for your website, be sure to use keywords in the file names and alt text. This will help Google understand what your images are about and ensure that they show up in relevant search results.
Images Help You Tell a Story
A picture is worth a thousand words, but it can also help you tell a story. Humans are hardwired to respond to stories, so using images on your website is a great way to engage potential customers.
Whether you’re sharing customer testimonials or showcasing your product’s features, adding images will make your content more compelling. When you’re telling a story with images, be sure to use a mix of close-ups and wide shots. This will help keep potential customers engaged and prevent them from getting bored.
Optimised Images Help You Stand Out on Social Media
If you want to increase traffic to your website, you need to be active on social media. Posting images is a great way to get more attention on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Make sure that you’re using high-quality images that are relevant to your brand. Whenever possible, try to use images that are unique – this will help you stand out from the competition.
In addition to posting images on social media, you should also include share buttons on your website. This will make it easy for potential customers to share your content with their friends and followers.
Images Help You Convert More Customers
If you want to increase sales and conversions, you need to use images on your website. In addition to using high-quality pictures, you should also consider using product photos and infographics.
Product photos are a great way to show potential customers what they’re buying. If you sell physical products, be sure to include multiple pictures of each item. Infographics are another great way to engage potential customers and increase conversions.
When used correctly, images can be a powerful tool for increasing traffic and conversion rates. Make sure to use high-quality pictures that reflect your brand identity, and don’t forget to include keywords in the file names and alt text. By following these tips, you’ll be able to use images to improve your web performance and lead generation.
Benefits of Image Optimisation
Web page optimisation is critical for e-commerce, blog, portfolio, travel, and media sites. It can help improve your website’s speed and performance, making it more user-friendly and responsive. In addition, optimising your images can also lead to better search engine ranking and traffic, as well as increased leads and conversions.
There are many benefits of image optimisation, including:
Improving Page Load Times
Optimised images can help reduce a web page’s size, leading to faster loading times. This is especially important for users who are browsing the web on mobile devices with slower data speeds.
Therefore, if you optimise the images on your website which comprise 64% of its weight, you will also be improving your website speed. This provides users with a quicker experience overall, who are then more likely to engage with your product or service. This includes all the images including animated images, raster images, product images, and other media files inside your media library.
Increasing Website Responsiveness
Large image files can make a website sluggish, particularly on mobile devices. By compressing your images, you can improve your site’s overall responsiveness and user experience.
Improving Search Engine Ranking
Image optimisation can help improve your website’s search engine ranking by reducing its file size and improving its load time.
Increased leads and conversions
Optimised images can help increase the number of leads and conversions generated by your website.
Reduced Hosting Costs
Smaller image files can result in reduced hosting costs. Although one can opt to keep their current hosting plans, they will be able to enjoy more data storage for your website with reduced storage space required by your images.
Image optimisation is a critical part of web page optimisation. By compressing your images, you can improve your website’s speed, performance, responsiveness, search engine ranking, and lead generation. In addition, optimised images can also help reduce your website’s hosting costs.
If you’re looking to improve your website’s speed and performance, image optimisation is a great place to start. Your web pages become faster as you compress images and reduce their image file size.
What is CDN, and How Does It Work?
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a group of servers that are used to deliver content to users. When a user requests a web page, the CDN will serve the requested content from the server that is closest to the user’s location. This helps improve website performance by reducing latency and providing a more consistent experience for users.
A CDN, or content delivery network, is a system for delivering assets needed to load Internet content. This includes HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos. The popularity of CDNs is on the rise as more and more web traffic is served through them – even traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.
Although a CDN doesn’t store files like a web host does, it will help with caching content at the network edge. Having this makes website performance much better. Because traditional hosting services cannot always give good performance results, many people go for CDNs instead.
A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a network of servers linked together with the objective of delivering information as swiftly, inexpensively, and securely as possible. A CDN will deploy servers at the exchange points among various networks to improve speed and connectivity.
ISP’s are key locations where various Internet providers join forces to provide each other access to traffic from different networks. By connecting to these high-speed and well-connected locations, a CDN provider can lower costs and transit times in high-speed data delivery.s
For anybody with an Internet property, uptime is a crucial element. Hardware failures and spikes in activity, whether caused by malicious attacks or simply increased awareness, have the ability to bring down a web server and prevent users from accessing a website or service. A comprehensive CDN has several features that can help minimise downtime.
Best Ways to Audit the Images on Your Web Pages
If you want your website content to be optimised for your target keywords, then image optimisation is a key step that you cannot afford to ignore. Here are the top things that you should include in your website audit to effectively optimise images for your website.
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Creating an Image Inventory
Before you can begin to improve your images for website optimisation, you need an inventory of all the pictures currently on your site. There are tools that can be used for this process, such as Google’s webmaster tools, but you can also do it manually.
To create an inventory, start by going through each page of your website and noting down all the images that are used. Include the file name, the ALT text, the title, and anything else that you think might be relevant. This will give you a good starting point for improving your images.
Diagnose Optimisation Issues
We can now look at the site’s images in detail and see what parts of our findings may be applied to diagnosing any optimisation flaws. We’ll be able to identify most problems in bulk for several of the qualities we’re going to look at. Others, particularly those requiring more subjective analysis, will need to be evaluated individually.
Some of the most common issues that can be found are slow loading times, missing ALT text, and incorrect file sizes. These are all things that can be easily fixed and will improve the overall performance of your website.
Choosing The Right Image Formats
Vector and raster are the two most common graphic types. The proper format for one of your images is determined by its distinct features. Simple geometric forms can be converted to vector (SVG) format, while images with complicated shapes, colours, and details should be saved as raster formats (GIF, PNG, or JPEG).
Vector graphics are files that are created using mathematical formulas. These images can be scaled to any size without losing quality, making them ideal for logos and illustrations. Raster images are made up of pixels, so when they’re enlarged, they become blurry.
Raster images are best for photographs. The three most common raster image formats are JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
JPEGs are best used for images with plenty of colours, like photos. They’re also the smallest file size, so they load quickly.
GIFs are best used for simple images with a few colours, like logos. They can also be used for animated images.
PNGs are similar to GIFs, but they can have transparent backgrounds, which is helpful if you want to place your image on top of another image or colour.
When choosing which format to use, keep in mind that JPEGs are usually the smallest file size, so they load the quickest. GIFs and PNGs can be larger, so they might take longer to load.
PNG files are the best format for most photos because it supports transparency and doesn’t lose quality when compressed or when you resize images. JPEG is a good format for screenshots, product photos, and other images that don’t need transparency but can be slightly compressed without noticeable loss in quality. GIF is only used for animated images, as it supports a maximum of 256 colours.
Knowing which type of photo to use on your websites allows you to determine how to optimize images more efficiently.
Reviewing Image Performance
There are several highly technical techniques for reducing the time it takes websites to load. Browser caching, CSS minification, and deferring external requests are just a few examples. Reducing and compressing pictures is the most (and frequently most successful) straightforward method to enhance page speed.
It’s time to consider the picture elements that might have a negative influence on performance, such as bytes per pixel and total pixels, once you’ve selected the best format for your photos.
Auditing Images for Keywords
One of the common mistakes that causes an image to perform less than expected is the lack of keywords. These mistakes can be due to the improper file name of images, the lack of appropriate alt texts, and the actual text on the images. Identify these images to be able to assign appropriate image details to help search engines understand the images on your web pages.
Reviewing Images for Subjective Quality
Now that you list down the images that require performance and keyword optimisation, the next step would be to evaluate your images according to its quality.
As the task already indicates, this process will be subjective. Different auditors may have different point of views when it comes to this review. The process includes determining the originality of the images, its production value and if they are serving their purpose in providing information about your services, products, and your brand.
Implementing Your Audits
After creating a list of the images that requires your attention, now is the time to act and implement these changes. Among the top tasks to include are:
Optimising your images can help improve your brand’s web performance and lead generation. By reducing the file size of your images, you can improve the speed at which your pages load. This will make it easier for visitors to view your content, and may encourage them to stay on your site longer.
Additionally, by ensuring that your images are properly keyword-tagged and have appropriate alt texts, you can help improve your site’s search engine visibility. This can lead to more visitors finding your site through organic search results, which can in turn lead to more leads and conversions.
How to Optimise Web Images for SEO
Businesses these days are under more pressure to achieve Internet recognition than ever before. We’ll discuss when it’s appropriate to hire an SEO professional and how they can help your business grow. When is the right time to consider hiring an expert for your SEO strategies for growth? Here are the signs that indicate that it’s the best time for your organisation to work with an SEO company.
You’re Not Getting the Traffic You Want
The first and most obvious sign that you need to look into hiring an SEO specialist is a drastic drop or plateau in traffic. If your website isn’t receiving the organic traffic it deserves, then it’s time to start thinking about bringing on some help. Even if your website is fairly new, you should be seeing a consistent stream of traffic from Google and other search engines. If you’re not, there are likely some optimisation issues at play.
You Don’t Rank for Keywords You Should Be Ranking For
Another sign that you need to hire an SEO consultant is if you’re not ranking for certain keywords that you should be. If you’ve done your research and know that a particular keyword would be valuable for your business, but you just can’t seem to crack the top 10, it might be time to get some help. Keep in mind that SEO is a long-term game, so don’t expect to see results overnight. However, if after several months you’re still not where you want to be, it might be time to consider outside help.
Your Competitors Are Outranking You
If your competitors are outranking you for key search terms related to your business, it’s definitely time to seek professional help. It’s important to keep an eye on what your competition is doing, so you can stay one step ahead. If they’re investing in SEO and seeing results, there’s a good chance you should be too.
You’re Not Seeing Any ROI From Your Current SEO Efforts
If you’re not seeing a return on your investment from your current SEO efforts, it might be time to hire an expert. A good SEO specialist will be able to help you create content that is both informative and keyword-rich, as well as help you with link building and other strategies. If you’re not sure where you’re going wrong, an expert can help you troubleshoot and get back on track.
You Don’t Have the Time or Resources to Handle SEO In-House
Last but not least, if you simply don’t have the time or resources to handle your SEO, it’s certainly time to consider hiring someone else to do it for you. SEO is a time-consuming process, and it’s important to do it right if you want to see results. If you’re stretched too thin already, an expert can take some load off of your plate.
Hiring an SEO specialist is a big decision, but if you’re not happy with your current traffic levels, it might be time to take the plunge. Keep an eye out for these signs, so you’ll know when the time is right.
Alt Text and Best Ways to Create One
Alt text is the phrase that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the picture does not load for a user. This text aids screen-reading technologies in describing pictures to blind visitors, as well as enabling search engines to crawl and rank your website more effectively.
No matter what your website looks like or how you found it, optimising the image alt text will result in a better experience for all users.
Why Optimise Alt Text?
There are three main reasons to take the time to optimise your image alt text:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these benefits:
Improve Accessibility
As we mentioned earlier, adding alt text to images makes them more accessible to users with visual impairments. By including concise and descriptive information about each image on your website, you can help these users understand what they’re looking at.
In some cases, you may even want to include additional information in your alt text. For example, if an image is part of a data visualisation, you might want to include the data points in the alt text so that screen-reading technologies can read them aloud.
Boost SEO Rankings
In addition to helping blind users, adding alt text to images can also improve your website’s SEO. As we mentioned earlier, search engines use this text to understand what pictures are about and how they relate to the rest of your content.
If you want your website to rank well in search results, it’s important to use keyword-rich alt text that accurately describes each image. However, you should avoid keyword stuffing, as this will likely result in a penalty from Google.
Increase Conversions
Finally, optimising your image alt text can also lead to more conversions on your website. In addition to helping search engines understand your images, alt text can also be used to provide context for users who are browsing your website.
For example, if you have an ecommerce website, your product images should include alt text that describes the product and its key features. This way, users will know what they’re looking at before they click through to the product page.
Including well-written and descriptive alt text on all of your website’s images is a simple way to improve the user experience and boost your SEO. If you’re not sure how to write alt text, start by including a short and accurate description of the image. From there, you can experiment with different techniques to see what works best for your website.
Can Images Help in Lead Generation?
The use of photographs and images is critical for connecting with prospects and developing credibility. If your leads can view the product’s characteristics, they will be more inclined to trust your company. In addition, high-resolution pictures that represent your products and services may assist you develop your business. The most important thing, however, is to make certain that your image files are optimised for web performance.
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