Everything You Need to Know When Optimizing Images for Websites

You’ve created a beautiful business website and have done everything possible to ensure your website optimizes for keyword search. While keywords play an essential role in website SEO, it’s not the only thing that search engines like Google look at when presenting your website to users.

What else can you do to improve your website’s visibility? The solution is optimizing images for websites. Keep reading to discover ways you can do this.

Why Optimizing Images For Websites Is Important

Images are one of the primary information users engage with when browsing. This is why search engines look at the business website images to gauge its SEO score. The poorer the score, the more likely users would disengage from the website and bounce away. 

Search engines crawl your website to judge its performance. It looks at metrics such as loading speeds, user engagement rates, and scroll depth. Factors such as the website image size and quality, as well as the website image placement, impact the score.

How To Optimize Website Images With Image Format

You can optimize your website’s images by reducing their file sizes. This decreases users’ wait time, making the navigation experience less tedious. Yet, reducing the quality of your images too much would result in compressed messes. This would make your business website appear less professional.

The key is finding the balance between file size and quality. There are generally two image file formats that websites use, which are the JPG and PNG formats.

JPG format is usually compressed for speed, and PNG optimizes for quality and losslessness. The PNG format also keeps an image’s transparency, where you can remove background from an image to highlight the subject while keeping file size low.

Image resolutions

Aside from quality, the image size itself does not need to be larger than it needs to be. The most common computer display resolution hovers around 1920×1080px. This means your website does not need images larger than this, even on the full-screen display.

This is also true for mobile browsing, as the vertical nature of mobile devices means large horizontal images won’t fit well. Search engines consider responsiveness between desktop and mobile browsing nowadays, meaning images must respond to different browsing devices. 

Image placements 

Finally, you’d have to ensure that the images’ placement is relevant to the other information presented. It is helpful to have pictures placed between other important information, as it may hold the user’s attention for a longer time. This helps with the scroll depth metrics, meaning you can keep your audience on your page for a longer time.

Start Optimizing Those Images!

Optimizing images for websites is almost as important as optimizing keywords for search engines. Images tend to take up a large part of a user’s experience when browsing a website. So remember to put some time and thought into it. Don’t allow your customers to bounce off your website for waiting too long!

Want to keep learning about similar topics? Check out the other blog posts on our site!