How To Optimize Images for Your Website In 5 Easy Steps

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If you have a website, then you know that images are a vital part of it. They can help improve your website’s overall look, give visitors a better user experience, and even help with your website’s SEO.

However, if your images are not properly optimized, then they can also negatively impact your website. Large image files can slow down your website, and poorly-formatted images can create a jarring user experience.

In this article, we will show you how to optimize images for your website in 5 easy steps. By the end of this article, you will know how to resize, compress, and format your images for the web.

Step One: Resize Your Images

The first step to optimizing your images is to resize them. When it comes to image file size, smaller is always better. That’s because smaller images are easier for browsers to load.

Of course, you don’t want to make your images too small. If you do, then they will become pixelated and difficult to see. The key is to find the perfect balance between file size and image quality. Ideally, your images should be no larger than 1MB.

However, this can vary depending on the format of your image. To resize your images, there are various online tools that you can use, or you can make use of programs like Photoshop. These tools make it easy to resize your images in just a few clicks.

Step Two: Compress Your Images

The next step is to compress your images. Compressing your images helps to reduce their file size without reducing the quality of the image. This is especially important for large images, as reducing the file size can help to speed up your website.

Compressing your images is easy to do with online tools or Photoshop. Just upload your image and let the tool do its work. In just a few seconds, you’ll have a compressed image that’s ready to be used on your website.

Step Three: Balance File Size and Quality

As we mentioned before, it’s important to find the perfect balance between file size and quality. If your image is too small, it will be pixelated. But if your image is too large, it will slow down your website.

The best way to find this balance is to experiment with different file sizes and see how they impact the quality of your image. If you’re using an online tool like PicResize, you can easily do this by changing the “Quality” setting.

As a general rule, you should aim for an image that’s around 100KB. However, this will vary depending on the format of your image.

Step Four: Choose the Right File Format

There are many different image file formats, but not all of them are suitable for the web. The two most common formats for web images are JPEG and PNG.

JPEG is a lossy format, which means that some image quality is lost when the image is compressed. However, JPEG images are typically smaller in file size, which is why they are ideal for the web.

When we click on ‘inspect’ over one of the images on this website for New York Style Pizza in Newcastle, we can see that the images are JPEGs.

PNG is a lossless format, which means that no image quality is lost when the image is compressed.

However, PNG images are typically larger in file size, which is why they are not ideal for the web. When it comes to choosing the right file format, it’s important to balance quality and file size.

In most cases, JPEG is the best format for the web. However, if you need a transparent background or want to preserve the quality of your image, then PNG is the better choice.

Step five: Add alt text, names and descriptions

Alt text, or Alternative text, is a written description of an image. The alt text describes what the image is, and what the purpose of the image is.

This data is used by screen readers to describe the image, to people who may need more accessibility when it comes to the website. Google also uses this alt text to see if the image is relevant to whatever the search query was.

When we look at this pizza restaurant in Newcastle, we can see how the alt text/names have been added, by looking through ‘inspect’.

Following on from this, it is also important to use a good image name along with a description. This is similar to the alt text, but the name of your image will give your readers some more context to go with it.

Having image names will also help it to be found in Google images. This is also beneficial as it can also help draw people to your site through another channel.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we’ve shown you how to optimize images for your website in 5 easy steps.

By following these steps, you can make sure that your images are properly sized, compressed, and formatted for the web.

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