Importance of Image Optimization to a website
What is image optimization?
Image optimization essentially means making sure your website images are in the right format, size, and resolution. Sounds good, but why does it matter? If you want more website visitors and want them to have a great website experience, then you should care about image optimization. When optimizing your website images, a good developer will consider –
File size and type
Dimensions and angles
Thumbnails and decorative images
Image sitemaps
Image descriptions (titles and alt-tags)
SEO best practices
User experience (UX) is everything.
Unoptimized or poorly optimized images can slow a website down Sluggish websites make people cranky and then they leave. Studies show that you have about two seconds before a visitor will move on from a slow loading site. Image optimization helps ensure your website loads quickly, keeping visitors happy. Optimization also means better image quality. No one likes a website with blurry, grainy images or oddly sized pics.
It’s also about SEO
Images optimization is a big part of user experience, but it’s equally important to SEO. Google and other search engines care about page load speed, and as we learned, image optimization is all about making your website faster. Also crucial to SEO is making sure images are accurately labeled so search engines can read and understand them. Correctly optimized images can give a significant boost to your SEO ranking.
So do I need it?
This time we say hands down, yes, yes, yes! Image optimization is a must-have for every website. This goes double for eCommerce sites with a ton of product images that need to be on point. Be sure to bring this up if you are building a new website. Make sure image optimization is included in the contract. For long term solutions, a good web developer can help you understand what needs to be done. There are plug-ins that can help, and they can build a plan that works for you.
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