Optimize Your Images on every page of your website

We all know the saying ‘A picture is worth more than a thousand words.’ While that isn’t necessarily true as long as web posts are concerned (imagine uploading a picture in place of a 1,000 words article), images are useful in terms of making your posts more enjoyable and compelling.

To get a fast loading time on your page one of the things you need to do is to optimize the images shown on it.

So it isn’t enough for you to take any picture off the net and insert it into your article.

But, what does it mean to optimize photos? Optimizing photos or images is the process to get the maximum quality of a picture with the less file size as possible.

For example, when you take a picture with a digital camera, that picture can have a file size of several megabytes (MB), usually 4, 5 or even 10 MB or more.

If you upload that picture directly to your website, basically you are forcing your users to download that file size with their internet connection. Not only that, if you add the weight of all the images that the user can see at the same time on a website, the total megabytes to be downloaded by the user will be much higher, making it take a long time to load the site, especially on a mobile connection.

As a general rule, we can establish that an image should weigh a maximum of 100 Kb, although this figure is merely indicative and will depend on the context (an image that accompanies a text is not the same as an infographic with a high resolution).

What we should get used to is to always reduce the resolution of the source image, for example, the camera of an iPhone XS takes photos with a resolution of 12 Megapixel, which is equivalent to a picture with a resolution of 4200×2800 px.

This size is excessive for a website, so if we reduce this resolution to the minimum necessary with a photo retouching program (Photoshop, Gimp, etc.) we will save a lot of space and optimize the loading of the website.

Always use jpg image format when no transparency is needed or use png when you need it.

Another essential thing to remember relative to improve your SEO is that you need to add alt and titles to the picture, including keywords describing the image.

These image attributes will not only help to SEO but also to visually impaired persons.

Newer formats are: WebP, JPEG 2000 and JPEG XR

Why Is It Important?

Everyone will prefer to read an article spiced up with colorful pictures rather than one without pictures. The latter might be more informative, but the images in the former would make it more enjoyable and draw in more traffic.

Using alt tags would make search engines, people who are visually impaired and those who are unable to load the images (possibly from a poor connection or they turned off image viewing on their browser) know what the image is all about and how it relates to the article. Titles also do virtually the same function of describing the picture to people who find it hard to interpret it. These would make your images to be understood by all and sundry.

Slow loading could significantly chase your visitors away. Reducing the weight and size of your images would enable them to be loaded much faster. This would improve the user's experience with your website and help you draw in more traffic.

Top 5 SEO Tools to optimize the images on your website:

• JPEG Optimizer (Free): great for image optimization and gives you the ability to upload and compressing them online. Works for only JPEGs. The level bar makes image optimization easier for your taste.
• Kraken.io (Free): Kraken happens to be yet another fantastic tool for compressing images where you can upload pictures in bulk in JPGs, PNGs, as well as animated GIFs. Even small file sizes can be optimized, and it is possible to download images that have been compressed individually or in a zip for time conservation. Dropbox exporting and file importation from Box and Google Drive, as well as Dropbox.
• Optimizilla (Free): Optimizilla helps you to come up with quality images with small file sizes, and you can compress photos in JPEG and PNG formats.
• CompressNow (Free): CompressNow ranks among user-friendly optimization tools which help you make bulk uploads. Upload photos from your PC in JPEG and PNG formats, as well as GIF and you, can set compression percentages for every image before downloading it on your website.
• ImageRecycle (Free): ImageRecycle helps to compress images that are in jpeg and PNG as well as GIF and PDF formats with very quality results while giving you drag-and-drop options for getting images into your website and optimizing them.

Top 5 WordPress Plugins to optimize the images in your posts

• reSmush.it (Paid): reSmush remains a top plugin for compressing WordPress images as it lets you Auto-optimize photos once uploaded. Older images can also be optimized in bulk.
• EWWW Image Optimizer (Free): EWWW also remains another useful plugin for compressing WordPress images. You can easily optimize photos automatically while uploading with the ability to compress and optimize pictures that were previously uploaded all at once.
• ShortPixel Image Optimizer (Paid): is included in the list of best plugins for compressing WordPress images but you need to make use of an API key which will be sent to your email. You can use the free account which gives you access to 100 compressions every month or upgrade the account to surpass this limits set by the developer.
• Compress JPEG ">WP Smush (Free): WP Smush remains a top plugin for compressing WordPress images as it lets you Auto-optimize photos once uploaded. Older images can also be optimized in bulk.

Did you know? There are many online image converter on the internet to turn any image format to another. Also, if you have a large number of images they can batch process all the pictures together, saving you time.

Expert’s suggestion: “images bring an article to life and can also contribute to your website’s SEO.” – Michiel Heijmans (https://yoast.com/image-seo/)