Pictures are essential for any website, regardless of whether you post news or keep a personal blog from your travels worldwide. Images affect the popularity of a site. Search engines better perceive web pages, which provokes additional traffic from Google. And, of course, articles with pictures appeal more to your readers. According to statistics, texts illustrated with beautiful and high-quality images are read much more often, the same, but without graphics.
It is important to remember that simply uploading a photo to the site will not work. Each picture needs pre-processing for better optimization. You may need to crop the photo, resize it, color correct it, and more. The main goal of this processing is to make the images better perceived by both search engines and visitors to your site.
Today we’ll talk about some things you should consider before uploading photos to your site.
Website Image Requirements
Each picture in your article is essential for both readers and search engines. In this case, the title image is considered to be especially important. It is this photo that can persuade the visitor to further reading. For example, in your blog, you discuss a trip to London. An exciting title picture can intrigue the reader and persuade him to read it.
Graphic files that you place on your site must meet a number of requirements:
- Uniqueness. You should not take pictures from other resources that have already been used hundreds of times by other users.
- Normal size. Don’t use photos that are too small; pixels and blur can spoil the whole impression of your text.
- It is advisable to choose images in JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP formats.
- The presence of Alt attributes. Write information for each of your pictures. Otherwise, the images simply will not be indexed by search engines. Include keywords in Alt for which you want to promote your photo.
- Make sure that all photos on your site are posted legally; otherwise, sooner or later, you will run into problems with copyright holders.
- Be sure to optimize your shots before uploading them to the site.
Ways to Optimize Photos
The desire to upload photos of the highest quality to your site is understandable. But do not forget that such images carry considerable weight. Just a few pictures in the text weighing from 1 megabyte will lead to the fact that the page will load extremely slowly.
Website loading speed has recently become a critical factor in determining a resource’s relevance. If your pages take several minutes to load, getting to the TOP of the issue is out of the question. Therefore, we will dwell in a little more detail on optimizing images for your site without losing quality.
Preferred Picture Format
Most often, pictures are uploaded to the site in two formats JPEG (JPG) and PNG. Animated GIFs can be used, but they often don’t display correctly when the site loads. JPEG is in priority; this is the format that compresses best with almost no loss of quality.
Image Weight
The lighter the picture, the faster it loads. This indicator may depend on several parameters:
- Image size in pixels. The larger the size of your snapshot, the more megabytes it will have in total.
- The content of the picture. The weight of the image increases the presence of small details, a large number of colors, etc.
- Quality. The degree of compression directly affects the weight of the image. Don’t aim to use pictures in the highest image. If you upload two photos – in maximum and medium quality- you will not notice much difference when viewing the page.
How to Reduce Image Weight
As mentioned above, the more your image weighs, the slower it will load on the site. The easiest option to reduce weight is to crop the image. In the process, you simply remove what does not play a unique role in the picture. It can be a background, extra elements, etc.
You can crop with the help of graphic editors like Photoshop, as well as using various online services. The latter option has several advantages – fast processing, no need to learn complex functions, and free access.
If there are people in the picture, we advise you to familiarize yourself with the rules for proper framing.
Reducing the Size with Compression
You can compress the image in graphic editors to reduce its size. It is available in two formats – lossy and lossless. In the latter case, the painting itself is practically not affected. Unnecessary meta tags are analyzed and removed – the time of the shooting, the place, the camera used, etc.
Strive to ensure that your pictures on the site are of interest to visitors. At the same time, do not forget about optimization.