It doesn’t matter what kind of website you have: images and are essential to maintain engagement and improve performance.
However, unoptimized images can consume storage space and slow down the loading speed of the website. In fact, you’ll probably abandon a website because images take too long to load. To improve the overall performance of your website and provide a better experience for visitors, optimizing images is key.
The goal of image optimization is to reduce the file size of an image without sacrificing its quality. Consequently, it consumes fewer resources, loads faster and has a positive effect on SEO.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about optimizing images, including how-to tips and tool recommendations.
What is image optimization?
Image optimization is the process of adjusting high-quality web images to use the proper format, dimension, and resolution while keeping the files as small as possible. This involves optimizing for file size, aspect ratio, formatting, and more. Optimizing and adjusting images improves the performance and ranking of a website.
Why is it important to optimize images?
Optimized images help improve the speed and overall performance of your website, including rankings and user experience.
Let’s look at some more benefits of optimizing images in detail.
Better use of resources
Large images consume more storage space and require more bandwidth for files to be successfully transferred to users’ web browsers.
If you run a website with limited resources, you’ll need to find a way to make the most of your disk space.
By optimizing images, small website owners can significantly reduce the amount of bandwidth and disk space required to display and store their images. Site visitors will also benefit, as optimized images will help reduce page load time.
Another benefit of having a lighter website is that it will take much less time to create.
better positioning
Google has made page speed a crucial component of its , favoring websites that load quickly and penalizing those with slow speeds.
Websites with optimized media files will load pages faster, giving them a better chance of appearing in Google Image Search. For , you can use free tools like Google.
Better user experience
Another great benefit of optimizing images is the improved user experience. By combining fast page loading and easy navigation, your site visitors are likely to stay longer to learn more about what you do, create and offer.
The process of optimizing images includes adding alternative texts to them, which improves the accessibility of the site. We will discuss this later in this article.
Tips to optimize images and improve site speed
In this section, we’ll go over several things you need to consider to optimize the images on your site, such as format, file size, resolution, and more.
1. Choose the correct file format
The is the first aspect to consider in this process. Before breaking down the different image formats, it is important to note that they are classified as vector and raster.
Vector file formats include SVG, PDF, EPS, and AI. Vector images often work well for representing images that are a combination of lines, dots, and colors, such as logos and icons. The main advantage of vector images is that you can scale them without compromising quality.
Meanwhile, raster images are based on pixels, which makes them resolution dependent. This means that they lose quality and become blurry or pixelated when they are resized. Image file formats in the raster category include JPEG, PNG, GIF, and RAW.
Let’s take a look at the most common file formats that work well in almost all browsers and can be edited in most image editing programs.
jpeg
In particular, the most popular image file format, JPEG, is supported by almost all devices and operating systems. Since JPEG images are relatively small, they don’t slow down web page load times and are quicker to load or transfer.
Both reference and progressive JPEGs are also great at preserving color. However, since JPEG files use lossy compression, the smaller the file size, the lower the image quality. This is because every time a JPEG is edited, more data is removed.
Therefore, this format will not work well on images that require continuous adjustment and contain text as it will be difficult to read after reducing the file size.
gifs
GIF files are 8-bit images that display a maximum of 256 colors. This means that GIF images are not as sharp in quality as other formats. Although the GIF format is not suitable for higher-quality images with a wide color gamut, it supports transparency, simple line drawings, and text, and produces small file sizes.
GIF is the best format for creating animated images, which is a great way to create engaging content.
Images in this format load quickly and consume less bandwidth, making it a good alternative for sharing simple images in banner ads, blogs, and social media.
Popular websites like and allow you to easily create GIFs and save them all in one place.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
Another popular file format for website images is PNG. PNG files can have up to 256 colors and support partially transparent images, capturing color information more efficiently than GIFs and displaying higher quality than JPEG images.
If you need to create or save images such as logos, icons, simple illustrations, or anything else that requires a smooth transition between colors, PNG images are a great option.
Also, the PNG format works well for images with a lot of text, such as screenshots, infographics, and banners. However, since this file format is larger than JPEG, using too many PNG files will slow down page load time.
WebP
As a solution to improve lossless and lossy image compression, Google developed this image format. combines features from other popular web image formats, such as replacing GIFs with animations and PNGs with transparency.
Unfortunately, several CMS (Content Management Systems) platforms do not support the WebP format. However, for users who have a WordPress site running WordPress 5.8 or higher, it will be possible to upload WebP images to the media library.
To automatically convert images in your media library to WebP format, you’ll need to install a plugin like u .
two. Compress your image files
When compressing image files, a critical point to remember is that smaller file sizes generally result in lower image quality.
Image compression not only reduces storage and bandwidth usage, but also provides faster page load and download times for site visitors.
However, you should consider image content, color gradients, and intricacy of detail when choosing how to compress images for your website without sacrificing quality.
An advantage of choosing raster files over vector images is that you can use lossy or lossless compression techniques with them.
When you use lossy compression, some data is removed from the image, resulting in a smaller file.
On the other hand, lossless compression does not affect the quality or clarity of the image, since it only removes non-essential data. If you need to use high-quality photos on your site, lossless compression is probably the best option, even if it means a slightly longer load time.
Here is an example of the result of a lossless compression using ShortPixel.
Several image editing programs, including Adobe Photoshop, come with image compression tools. When compressing your images, be sure to implement the following best practices:
- Compress images before uploading. It is best to compress the images before uploading them to your site. This helps you save disk space and speed up the loading process.
- Automates the compression process. If it’s a handful of images, automatic compression may not be a priority. However, this is an excellent alternative when you need to compress a large number of images simultaneously, as it saves you a lot of time. Automation is also useful for compressing images into different formats and naming the files.
- Adapt image compression to the device. Make sure to use the proper compression formats based on the target device. For example, lower resolution images can still look good on mobile devices and help improve the user experience on your website.
For existing images on your site, testing tools like will help identify which images need to be optimized.
professional tip
To save even more storage space, check your site’s media library to remove unused images. If you use WordPress, plugins like these can help make the process more efficient.
3. Use the right image dimensions
Image size and dimension are two different things. The first refers to how much storage space an image takes up on your website: the size of an image file is usually measured in KB (kilobytes) or MB (megabytes).
On the other hand, image dimension refers to the width and height of the image in pixels.
Using images with incorrect dimensions is an inefficient process and will slow down the loading speed of the site.
For example, if you use a 500 x 500 px image for a 50 x 50 px thumbnail, the browser will need to download and scale the image correctly before displaying it to site visitors.
The best way to avoid this is by displaying images to scale. Scaled images fit the exact dimensions required by the website, whether it’s a full-width image or a…
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