There is a popular saying, “a picture is worth thousand words” and we know with our experience that it is really true. In this article we will explore about the mystified world of pictures and graphics. No matter how important your words are, you will need a picture or an image to compliment it. Can you imagine a website without pictures? No and this is the reason why pictures are considered so important. Also just like your text and graphs, images too play an important role in enhancing the ranking of website on Google. A perfect image attracts more visitors to the website, which makes it more recognizable across the web. If you want to take your E-Commerce business on the top then it is good time to place best pictures on your website.

There is also a popular process of converting PSD Design to Wordpress theme by which WordPress developers convert the PSD file into a WordPress theme. By this process we can get a dynamic and searchable WordPress site which you can use to upload your images after optimizing them.

Why to Optimize the Images?

It is very often seen that images can lag down a website because of its size and structure. If there are too many images on the website then they will take extra server storage space that increases the bandwidth of the site. Hence, these images should be optimized for good performance of the website in terms of its speed of opening. When we talk about digital world, speedy website is what everyone is looking for as a speedy website will bring more visitors, more customers, more sales and more revenue to the business.

Some of the major benefits of optimizing images on your website are:-

• Enhancing ranking in search engines
• Swift and easy processing
• Better overall performance
• Increases Sales and Revenue
• High ROI

If you are publishing an article on a website and if you only optimize the text part then it would limit the traffic that can come from image based search engine like Google Images. The more optimized images your site have, the faster it will run and get better rank in search engine results.

It is important for WordPres site owners to optimize the images for a speedy website and successful business overall. Some of the factors that you should consider while doing image optimization on your WordPress site are:-

Alt Text

Alt Text means Alternative Text and is used to denote the picture so that it is easily recognized by user as well as server. Alt Text is the word that search engine use to understand and find the image. Just add alt= “your alt text”to your image <img> tag.

Image Format

You should choose the right image format as different image formats have different functions. Generally there are three image file formats which are mostly used online:-

JPEG :-

JPEG is best for photographic images with a range of color distribution. JPEF images use lossy compression that includes partial image cropping to produce an image file with reduced size. It is important to strike a balance between the image loading time and size to avoid degradation of image quality.

PNG:-

PNG format images are best for illustrative images like logos, screen shots, banners, icons etc. PNG files use lossless compression technique hence the image quality of the compressed image is same as the original one and image size is larger than its JPEF size.

GIF:-

GIF format is mostly used for animated images. GIF also use lossless compression. These images are larger in size but low in quality as compared to JPEG files. 

Hence when we talk about image optimization then JPEG is the best suited file format with best quality and reduced size.

File Name

You should tag the file with a proper name to direct the user and the search engine to find the file quickly. So before uploading an image make sure you have given it a descriptive file name with keyword so that the image can rank high on search engine.

File Size

Speed of a website effects the Google’s ranking of that site. As so much space of the website is occupied by the images hence it should always be taken care of that images that are added to the website are not so large in size. And if they then they should be compressed and optimized using an image optimizer tool available online.

Some of the most famous image optimizer WordPress plugins are :-

WP Smush it
EWWW Image Optimizer

Conclusion

Hence if you are developing a WordPress website then it is better to install a WordPress Plugin to optimize the images and you can use it while uploading the images so that your images are balanced in loading speed and size and the users and your customers have to best user experience while browsing the site.