Images are one of the most crucial components of a website. Research shows that sites make up more than 60% of the data on a site. Be it news, food blogging, sports, or a fashion website, image optimization is essential, especially if you are aiming to speed up an already image-heavy website.
Image optimization is divided into three main categories, mentioned below.
- Images should load faster
- Image must load lighter
- Fewer images should be loaded
The techniques for speeding up an image-heavy website fall in any of the categories mentioned above. So, let’s take a look at five tips to speeding up an image-heavy website.
1. Image Resizing
One of the most common ways to speed up your image-heavy website is to resize the images. This includes, in particular, the resizing of an image on the server before it is sent to the browser. For example, you have a 3000-by-4000 image for your website. On your website, the size of this image needs to be small. Your requirement for this image is 200-by-300 on the product page and 800-by-1000 on the detail page. Before you send that image to the browser, make sure it is scaled down. The resized image will surely be smaller than the original one, and will load must faster.
2. Image Optimization
Choosing the right image format is another great way to speed up your image-heavy website. Some of the most common image formats are GIF, PNG, and GIF. A relatively new form, which is a combination of these three formats, is the WebP. It combines the characteristics of all of these formats and is much smaller. Luckily, this new format is conducive to just about every other browser out there.
3. Consider Mobile Usage
In today’s tech-savvy world, if you ignore the overall mobile usage, you would be committing a huge mistake. Studies have shown that more than 60% of the traffic on websites comes from mobile phones. Despite becoming better and more powerful, the speed of mobile data is far lower than that of broadband. There are some areas in the world where mobile internet connections are incredibly flaky. Therefore, it is imperative to keep in mind the mobile experience when designing a website.
4. Don’t Load Too Many Resources
Despite the optimization, loading too many resources at a time lowers the pace, each of them load. As a result, your user experience starts to suffer. This by no means transpires that you should load fewer images than necessary. It merely means that there are some cases when it is better not to load a bulk of images upfront.
5. Use a Reasonable CDN
Up until now, we have talked about image size, and the number of images to be loaded on a specific page. In this step, you need to make sure that the images are loaded quickly. Decreasing the average load time for an image will not only have a positive impact on your overall website load time but will surely enhance your user’s experience. As a result, your website will bag the opportunity to rank as high as possible on the search engine.
The tips mentioned above will help you speed up your image-heavy site, enhance, and user experience, thus boosting your ranking on the search engine. But you really shouldn’t worry about any of this, because we have got you covered. We are a professional web design company that provides you with websites that make you meet your business targets, quicker than you think. For more information, visit our website or call us now at 718-233-3120.