Images are a key part of any website. They can help break up the text, add visual interest, and give visitors a better sense of what your site is all about. But if they’re not properly optimized, images can also slow down your site and hurt your ranking in search results.
That’s why it’s important to take the time to optimize your images before uploading them to your WordPress site. In this blog post, we’ll share five tips for doing just that.
By following these tips, you can ensure that your images are helping—not hurting—your website.
Tips for Optimizing Images
Everyone uses images on their posts, and they can be vital for increasing your SERP visibility and dwell time. Here we’re sharing some tips which you need to make sure of before uploading images to your WordPress website.
1. Resize Your Images Before Uploading Them
One of the quickest and easiest ways to optimize your images is to resize them before uploading them to your site. Large image files can slow down your site, so it’s important to make sure that they’re no larger than they need to be.
You can easily resize your images using tools like Colorcinch, Lunapic, or Photoshop. Simply open up the image you want to resize, enter the dimensions you need, and save the new file. Once you’ve done that, you can upload it to your WordPress site without worry.
✍️ Author’s Note;
You can also resize your images directly on WordPress – but it may consume more space on your server and randomly set your image name.
Hence, we don’t recommend doing so.
2. Choose the Right File Format
The next step is to choose the right file format for your image. There are three main file formats for images—JPEG, GIF, and PNG—and each one has its own strengths and weaknesses.
JPEGs are ideal for photographs and other images with thousands of colors because they’re able to compress these types of images without losing too much quality. GIFs are best for simple graphics with a limited number of colors. They don’t support as many colors as JPEGs do, but they’re much smaller in size.
And finally, PNGs are perfect for graphics with transparent backgrounds because they support transparency without sacrificing quality or increasing file size too much.
3.’ Alt Text ‘ Is Essential
Whenever you upload an image to WordPress, you’ll see a field called “alt text.” This is where you can enter a short description of what the image is showing.
The alt text is important for two reasons: first, it helps search engines understand what your image is showing; second, it helps visitors with vision impairments understand what’s on the page (since they can’t see the image).
4. Don’t Forget About Image Titles
In addition to alt text, there’s also something called an “image title.” The title is different from the alt text in that it’s not visible on the actual image; instead, it appears when someone hovers their mouse over the image.
Like alt text, titles are important for both search engines and people with vision impairments…
But they’re also helpful for anyone who’s trying to understand what an image is showing (particularly if the alt text isn’t very descriptive).
5. Compress Your Images
Even after you’ve resize and cropped your images, they may still be too large in terms of file size… Which means they’ll still slow down your site if you don’t compress them further.
Luckily, there are a number of free tools available that make it easy to compress images without losing too much quality. Two popular options are TinyPNG and Kraken.
Just drag-and-drop your images into either tool, and let them work their magic. Once done, download the compressed version of your images.
Wrapping Up!
Optimizing images might seem like a lot of work, but it’s worth it in terms of improved site speed and better search engine rankings.
Plus, once you’ve gone through all of these steps once, subsequent uploads will be a breeze.
So go through each tip above, start optimizing those images, and see how much faster (and higher-ranking) your website becomes!
