Everyone today is running after the Google ranking, and why shouldn’t they? In order to improve the website position among the thousands of competitor website, it is important to adopt some tricks and tactics to stand out. Even if you built a visually appealing website, you wouldn’t be able to make a mark, if you are not able to achieve factors such as faster page loading time, proper positioning and formatting of images, or even using an older version of image formats. Times are changing, and in order to stay in the game, you will need to pay attention to the minute details on your website so that you appeal to the customers.
Here are some of the ways in which you can improve your app and website performance instantly; all you need are some minor tweaks in the website elements:
Considering the page speed as an important factor in SEO ranking and the impatience of customers towards slow web experiences, it is crucial that you take control of the image sizes in order to deliver a faster loading website. According to statistics published by HTTP archive, it was found that the images take up 21% of the website’s weight and optimizing them is more important than choosing the right font and scripts. Image compression works in two ways: lossy or lossless. Loss works in a manner that it discards information from the original file, whereas lossless enables you to retain the original data even though the size of the images tends to be bigger. You can easily find a wide number of image compression algorithms which take different approaches and help in reducing the file size. There are several online tools such as Image optimizer, RIOT, Smush.it and more that will enable you to minimize the size of the images. As the smaller image file sizes use less bandwidth, networks and browser tend to consider it as a good step towards building a top-ranking website or app.
There are different ways in which you perform image compression. First is by lowering the compression rate, which would retain the high quality of the image. Secondly, you can choose a high compression rate for low-quality image and small file size. It entirely depends on what you wish to achieve to achieve on your website. So, you can choose to play with the compression rate accordingly. This would help in reducing the page load time, enable you to create quick image backups, and ensure that images do not take up a lot of space on your disk.
Some years back, it was compulsory to upload the images to scale and restrict CSS from resizing them. When WordPress 4.4 came into the picture, this problem got solved to a great extent as it could support responsive images which were not scaled down by CSS. WordPress can now automatically resize the images and upload them to the media library. It is possible to download to the appropriate size of the images and ignore the others using the srcset attribute in WordPress.
WordPress is an excellent medium for HiDPI display nowadays. With this, the browser will adjust to the resolution of the device to present the correct size of the image. For instance, it would show the website’s column or div size as 2x or 3x, but it would still be lesser than the original one.
The media library present in WordPress has thumbnails which adjust according to the settings that you have chosen. However, the original images still remain untouched and can be retained for later use. If you wish to resize the images and save up the disk space instead of saving the original image, then you there are free plugins available to do the same such as Imsanity. With tools such as these, you will be able to adjust the sanity limit and constrain the image to a reasonable size which is probably larger than the requirement of a website.
Even before you start modifying the images, it is important that you choose the best file type as per the requirement of your website. You can choose among several types of files such as:
PNG – It produces high-quality images and has a larger file size. It was basically created as a lossless image format, but it can also be lossy as well.
JPEG- It makes use of both lossy and lossless optimization. Moreover, you can adjust the level of the file for a good balance between the quality and the file size.
GIF – It basically used 256 colours and is suitable for creating animated images. You will find this in lossless compression only.
Apart from these, you can also use other formats such as JPEG XR and WebP, but the problem with these is that you will not be able to run such images on all browsers. File formats such as JPG and JPEG are considered to be the ideal ones for the images where you need a lot of colours, whereas the PNG files can be used for simple images. Check out the free report provided at https://www.imghaste.com/pagespeed/ for more information on how you can improve your website and mobile apps performance.
Poor page load images can put off the customers who come to your website and should be taken seriously if you want to avoid a disaster. Here are a few things that you can do to curb the same:
Use adaptive images: This would help in adopting new image format such as WebP or JPegXR, which extremely useful as they reduce the image weight to 20-50% without compromising on the quality.
Develop a content delivery network: Keep a collection of static files such as Javascript and CSS in a global server. It would help to improve the delivery speed as it would transfer the files to the server, which is closed to the physical location of the user. For instance, when a user will click on a video, the file would automatically load faster as it would be closer to the servers nearby. Websites such as CDN, make the files easily accessible across the network.
Evaluate the plugins: If you are using poor quality plugins, then that would be a big problem, and if you have more plugins, then that would make the page load time slower. Make sure that you are using the right plugins for your website.
With the technology becoming better with each passing year, you have a lot of options when it comes to image optimization. Some of them would give you the tools to perform image optimization while others would automatically work for you. Tools such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Paint.NET, and more can be used for image optimization. A few things that you should keep in mind when it comes to image optimization are that:
On a final note, it is now clear that it is important to work on the minute details on the website in order to make it more efficient and appealing to the users. Do not forget to use these tips for reference and page optimization.