We know we need images to enhance our website and attract readers. Images become especially important when you’re uploading regular content, such as blogs and other articles. However, those images could inadvertently be damaging the reputation of your site… and slowly killing your WordPress site altogether!
Visitors to your site want a site that looks great AND loads fast – get this wrong and they will give up waiting for your site to load and leave. Badly optimised images could be one of the main culprits of a slow site, but how can you find out how fast your site loads and go about remedying the image problems?
In addition Google now penalise slow loading sites.
How fast is your site?
The first thing I’d recommend you do is check the actual speed of your site. Ideally you want it to load within 3 seconds and be smaller than 1mb. Luckily, Pingdom Website Speed Test will show you both the load time and overall size of your site, PLUS it will also show you the problem areas you need to address too.
Optimising help for images
Some free image download sites (such as FreeDigitalPhotos.net) will give you a low resolution, small image that is usually 400 pixels or less along its longest side. This keeps the overall file size small, making them the perfect size for uploading.
However, paid-for image sites tend to have larger, high resolution images (Dollar Photo Club and iStock Photo are at least 1600b x 1200 px in size). This means you NEED to amend them BEFORE you upload them to your site or you’ll be heading for trouble further down the line.
So what can you do to optimise your images?
- Keep the image size small (640 – 800 px)
- Format the image prior to uploading to your WordPress site
- Use the right image type
Formatting options
When it comes to formatting your images, you have a couple of options:
- If you’re using a mac, look at Image Optim and use the “save for web” feature
- Pixlr is a great for making minor formatting changes
- If you’re a Windows user, look into RIOT
You can also use the ‘paint’ option on Windows based PC’s. Once you’ve downloaded the image to your PC, click on it once to highlight it and select ‘edit’ from the picture toolbar. This will open ‘paint’. You can then click on ‘resize’ and edit the pixel size and click ‘save’ before you close the image.
Image types
The different type of image formats can be confusing – but it can be summed up easily:
- JPEG – is ideal for images and photos
- PNG – perfect for screenshots and images that have text on them, as it gives a sharper, crisper element to text than produced with jpegs. You need to use .png files if you have a transparent background you want to preserve.
- GIF – this is great for flat images (such as info graphics) and short animations
How to tidy up existing WordPress images
If you’re now worrying about going through your entire WordPress media library to optimise your images – don’t! There’s a plugin you can use called ‘WP Smush.it”. It allows you to optimise individual AND bulk images, making the whole process painless and easy. However, plugins can drastically slow down your website, and WP Smush.it is no exception, so plan to use it when your website usually has low traffic volumes.
Taking the time to optimise your images, prior to uploading them to WordPress is time well spent. Not only will it make a difference to your overall site speed – it will also make a big difference to your customer experience too!
Were you surprised at how optimised images can affect your website? Have you already used any of the above strategies and plugins to enhance your site? What was the biggest takeaway for you? Why not share your image optimisation experiences in the comments box below?