Undoubtedly every WordPress site has a number of images that help in improving user experience. The images are categorized into different forms such as Big Hero Images, Catalogs, Portfolio images, images of a whole group or team of a company, galleries, Online shops and so on.
Why are images important on a page?
- Images are attractive and improve user experience, hence reducing bounce rate.
- Images not only generate empathy but also set the mood.
- Images help in splitting big paragraphs for easier reading.
What's the problem with images?
The problem with images is that they are big in size and generally slow down the page load speed of the WordPress site. This does not mean that images should not be used in a website. But you do need to ensure that you optimize the images that are being used on the website.
Benefits of optimizing images are:
- Decreasing image size improves page load time of the webpage.
- For the content creators, it will take lesser time to upload images.
- Your website traffic will increase since Google prefers sending traffic to websites that load fast.
Steps to optimize images on a WordPress site
- Choose the correct image format
- Reduce image size to the smallest dimension possible
- Compress the image
- Use free WordPress plugins that optimize images
Choose the correct image format
Use WebP format if possible. But this format is not supported by older browsers. So if you want your images to be visible in older browsers, then use either JPG, PNG or GIF formats. If the image is not transparent, use JPG. If the image is transparent, then use transparent PNG. If the image has animation, then use GIF.
Reduce image size to the smallest dimension possible
Reducing image size is an easy way to optimize it. If the image is taken from a DSLR camera, then the dimensions of image are very large. Thus the size of the image need to be reduced. This can be done by resizing the image in any software such as Preview, Photoshop or Gimp.
Compress the image
Use one of the following free image optimization softwares to reduce size of the image even further:
- FileMinimizer Pictures (for JPG files)
- FileOptimizer (for PNG files)
- Radical Image Optimization Tool (for GIF)
Use free WordPress plugins that optimize images
Conclusion
Optimizing upload images is an important technique to decrease page load times of your WordPress site. You can do the same using the steps provided above.
