There is a saying, that a picture speaks a thousand words and that’s the reason why images are so important on your website. Customers can only be based on what they see, and if the images are not in high-resolution or sharp, that can be very bad for your business. Unfortunately high resolution images come with huge files sizes and that can be a serious problem. Large images slow down your webpages, if your site takes too long to load your visitors might get tired of waiting and move on to another website.
According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. You have to be sure that your images are appropriately sized. So it’s very important to find a good balance between image file size and image quality when you save a picture for your website. If you can minimize the size of the image files on your webpage and increase page-load speed, less people who visit your site will click away. You can do that by adopting new image formats, such as WebP by Google that help reduce image weight by 20 to 50 percent without sacrificing quality.
Fast load also improves your SEO. Your site will rank higher in search engine results. Large files slow down your site and search engines hate slow sites. Google uses page load time as a ranking factor in their algorithm. You can evaluate your website’s loading speed in PageSpeed Insights and your page images size in ages.im.
To conclude, when it comes to images there is likely more than meets the eye. Often overlooked and underestimated, images on the web have been getting more attention lately and their importance is growing for a variety of reasons ranging from purely supporting user experience and content to enabling users to visually find more products directly from image search itself. Optimization and implementation can vary greatly depending on your business type and goals so start with the end in mind and communicate the best strategy to your editorial team to capture as much (transactional) traffic as possible!