Boost Your Rankings Through These Image Optimization Techniques

Why do we need to optimize images? What does it bring to your site?

For starters, when images are optimized, the page loads faster. When a website is fast, rankings would be higher than the usual.

So, we all can safely say that image optimization can lead to higher web rankings. You should never undermine its positive effects to your website.

According to a 2016 Google study, it was proven that web pages loaded with images had lower conversion rates. It’s no surprise because pages filled with images will take long to completely load. No web visitor would like to wait for a long time.

That’s why it is imperative for websites to compress all their images. Below are the tips on editing your images to ensure a fast page load time while maintain a pleasant user experience:

1. To Add an Image or Not to Add?

That is the question. Always check if you really need an image for a web page. Is this particular image essential to the overall web design?

The rise of minimalism is because of the fact that users want to preserve the ideal UX more than the aesthetics. When there are less images, of course, the website will load better and also perform better.

For most web pages, images can’t be avoided. Because for some, these images are the center piece of the whole website.

Instead of focusing on the images to make your website better, you can utilize:

• Vector graphics to simplify logos and other designs.
• Embed the videos and drop the heavy GIFs.

The advantage of vector images is that it has a great resolution when viewed on equally high resolution devices.

Search engines can’t decipher the texts when you add it on images. One way to make sure that Google does not ignore the texts is use web fonts instead.

2. Use Image Compression Tools

Well, you can manually optimize your images. How?

• First tip: resize the image
• Second tip: compress the image

Yes, that can ensure faster page load time. However, when you manually do it, you will finish the image compression after 5 long years.

No, it won’t take years, but you get the point.

There are tools that will help you finish the task faster and make image compression easier.

For WordPress users, install Imagify and you can compress your images immediately. The best part is that the images are saved in your image library. You won’t be needing to upload each one. Thus, it saves you time.

Imagify supports both JPG and PNG image files. It will surely boost your website’s page load speed.

Reminder, a lossy compression may affect the image quality. However, it will reduce your image file size. Images will then be evidently light.

3. Use the Latest Image File Formats

The JPG has a lossy compression while the PNG has a lossless compression.

Basically, these 2 are the fundamental image formats. Did you know there are newer image formats?

These are: JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP. These formats preserves the original aspect ratios. Thus, you are sure that pages will load faster on mobile phones.

However, the downside is that WebP is the only format supported by Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.