Images are a great source to tell your visitors about your business, products, or services. Using big images for web can slow down your speed which also can impact your SEO ranking. Keep your image sizes to a minimum to reduce the amount of time a user is waiting for resources to load. Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data.
Image Optimization Best Practices
Alt Text
When you see a person dancing on a picture you know right away what is going on. This recognition is not possible for Search Engines spiders, instead you need to give them some clues of what the picture is about so they can show it in their search results. In other words the Alt Text is the text that search engines use to understand images.
To edit/add Alt Text to your images go to our article: Edit Image in a Page step 4.
File Name
As with the Alt Text, the File Name also gives Search Engines information about your photo. Include keywords in your titles so they can be showed up in those keyword’s search. Using these keywords gives your photos a descriptive name before uploading them to the site.
File Size
Big images will take your visitors time to load, making your website slow. Our websites provide the Resize Images Before Upload plugin which adjusts the size of an image if this is bigger that the maximum allowed (maximum size depends on each theme).
You can also use your favourite Image Editing software to crop, resize or ‘save for web’ your Images (i.e. Picassa, Photoshop, Paint, etc.). There are also some online tools you can use to optimize your images as much as possible without loosing much image quality. With these tools you can upload your images and the website will optimize it for you, then you can download them to your computer and use them on your website.
Some Online Image Optimizer Tools: