How many times have you left a website because it is taking too much time to load? Imagine your customers in your place. They too will do the same if your website doesn’t load quickly and properly. Almost every page of your website, including blogs, has images that suit the content, right? But, what if these images harm your website? Large and unoptimized images can slow down your site and this will impact the user experience. This is where image optimization comes in. Page loading issues can be addressed by optimizing images. This is among the many solutions provided by organic search engine optimization services.
A web page’s loading speed is determined by several different factors ranging from the site’s server to page file size, and image compression. Heavy images are one of the main reasons for high bounce rates.
Why optimize your images for SEO?
Statistics
| ·       GIF, PNG, and JPEG formats make up 96% of the entire Internet’s image traffic (Google)
·       Images are returned for 27.9% of search queries on Google. (IMPACT) ·       Google experienced a 20% drop in revenue for every 500-ms increase in the search results’ display time.      (Search Engine Watch) |
 Running an online store? It is important to understand the relevance of image optimization.
Image optimization is delivering high-quality images in the right format, dimension, size, and resolution while keeping them at the smallest possible size. The process involves either resizing the images, caching, or compressing their size. This also helps maintain image quality.
Benefits of optimizing website images:
- Improves your website performance
- Provides a better customer experience
- Improves SEO rankings
- Helps build better links
- Increases page loading speed
- Increases conversion rates
- Enhances site visibility
- Reduces bounce rate
The more your images can be compressed, the faster your page will load. Web image optimization refines images so as to lighten pages. The process can be time-consuming if done manually. You can use either a plugin or script to optimize images and speed up the load time of web pages.
Image optimization can be done in different ways, such as resizing the images, caching, or compressing the size. Depending on the web page layout and structure, the optimization methods will vary.
How to Optimize Images for WordPress
Reducing and compressing image size manually can be time-consuming. WordPress users can take advantage of image optimization plugins to streamline their efforts. WordPress image optimizer plugins allow you to upload images to your website without compromising its speed.
For websites that run on WordPress, we recommend using any of these image optimization plugins.
- Optimus
- ShortPixel
- Imagify
- Optimole
- it
Optimus
Optimus is an ideal plugin to automatically reduce the file size of uploaded media files. Depending on the image and format, 70%reduction in image size is easily possible. This tool can help with huge file size compression while maintaining image quality. To optimize images, this plugin transfers images uploaded to WordPress to the Optimus server. There are 3 different versions of Optimus – Optimus (Freebase version with limitations), Optimus HQ (Premium) and Optimus HQ PRO (Premium). This plugin connection uses SSL encryption, and the server does not keep any images.
ShortPixel
This image optimizer helps improves website performance by resizing, compressing and serving images from CDN. This image compression plugin uses advanced technology to reduce image size without any before or after difference in quality. This lightweight plugin optimizes JPEG, PNG, GIF and PDF type files. It can also generate the WebP/AVIF version of the image. This easy-to-use plugin can compress all the past images and PDF documents with a single click. Images are sent to the Image Optimization Cloud for compression. Unoptimized originals are then replaced with their optimized versions.
Imagify
Imagify will resize files automatically when uploaded in WordPress. Users can integrate this plugin in their custom development projects or apps to optimize images. This tool can optimize the image sizes generated by the WP retina x2 plugin that helps maintain both high resolution and performance. Its cross platform solution will help reduce the weight of images and thus improve the page loading time.
It can compress the most common image formats as well as PDF format. Users can specify image height and width values in pixels and percentages. Every month, users can optimize for free 20MB of images.
Optimole
This all-in-one image optimization plugin for WordPress is fully cloud-based and can optimize images automatically. This plugin features full compatibility with popular page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, and the new block editor in WordPress 5.0. It works with more than 200 server locations worldwide and can process all the images in real time. After compression, images will be served from a CDN, which reduces load times and bandwidth usage.
reSmush.it
reSmush.it can be implemented on the most common CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento. It can reduce image size based on several advanced algorithms such as pngquant, jpegoptim, optipng. Its API accepts JPG, PNG and GIF files up to 5MB. It can reduce even 70-80% size of all uploaded pictures. Users can specify the required compression level for JPG pictures.
Other image optimization plugins you can consider include
- WP Compress
- Kraken Image Optimizer
- Imsanity
- WP Rocket
- EWWW Image Optimizer
- Jetpack
- Robin Image Optimizer
Choose the right image optimizer WordPress plugin that meets your requirement. Images on the web are getting more attention now than ever. Images can make your content more appealing and interesting. It helps readers to understand your content better. Web designers at our SEO company in New York recommend the following tips to optimize your web images.
Key Tips to Optimize Images
- Compress images before loading them on your website
- Use the right image format
- Choose an ideal image size, aim for under 100Kb or less
- View your image performance in Search Console
- Consider the lazy loading technique to properly load images
- Use videos for animated GIFs to improve page load speed
Not just image optimization, there’s much more we can do to improve your web page loading speed and increase your conversion rates.
| Need help with search engine optimization, content writing services, and web design services?
Our team at MedResponsive can help! Call us at (800) 941-5527 and schedule a FREE consultation with our Senior Solutions Manager. |
