An image is surely worth a thousand words because it is true for advertising in any industry when it comes to developing a WordPress website. Images always remain in style and they do play a pivotal role on all kinds of websites; their presence helps to hold the users for longer. Additionally, it even enhances the website’s overall presence and makes it more appealing, trustworthy, and engaging for the users.
Among other WordPress development services, images are crucial for all website designs, especially e-commerce ones, as they get to hold clients better than long-written descriptions. Thus, adding a perfectly described image becomes a crucial requirement for the developers so that the popularity can increase manifolds.
Why do we need to talk about images?
We need this conversation because images can express thousands of emotions, features, colors, designs, and whatnot in a small space. When it comes to using images on web pages, one thing to keep in mind is optimizing them as per the layout of your WordPress website. To simplify this placement task, you can use the image placeholder generator tool in WordPress that helps in creating dummy images to be put on display for you to figure out if it suits you or not. Moreover, images occupy considerable space on your WordPress website, and therefore, it is critically essential to optimize them so that they do not hamper the website’s loading speed.
Using too many images on the website adds to the extra server storage space, resulting in increased bandwidth. As already explained earlier, optimizing every image is the ultimate solution. A fast-loading website is an essential ingredient for developing a functional, user-centric website. Thus, websites that have an exceptional loading speed bring more users, more sales, and more revenues to the business.
If you can’t do all this on your own, find a custom WordPress development services provider to help you out in making a website that already has an enhanced ranking, better performance, and swift processing so that you can always account for increased sales along with an amplified ROI.
Now let’s look at a few factors to be considered before heading toward the image optimization stages:
ATL Text
used for Alternative Text and denotes the picture so that users are at ease with recognizing it over the server.
Format of the Image
There are three major kinds of image file formats that you will mostly find.
- JPEG: It is prominently used for photographic images containing a range of color distributions.
- PNG: It is mostly used for illustrative designs and images like logos, icons, banners, screenshots, and other related imagery.
- GIF: This format is best suited for animated content. GIFs make use of the lossless compression technique for compressing the animated images so that they suit our needs.
The File’s Name
It is very important to tag your file with a proper name so that search engines, as well as their users, can locate and click on it easily. Thus, it is advised to choose descriptive filenames with relevant keywords so that the image can rank higher among the search engine results.
Size of the File
With the latest ranking algorithm developed by Google, websites having improved speed are favored. As a fact, images occupy only 63% of any website’s space; therefore, image optimization techniques must be kept under check before using them on the website. Now, resizing the images through tools like Photoshop is going to help without any compromise on the quality of the images.
Captions
These are considered a descriptive format of image data that is informative and, at the same time, explanatory. It is not directly responsible for affecting a page’s ranking but ensures that the bounce rate decreases.
Now, let’s take a look at some image optimizer plugins and how they can help your WordPress website run faster.
- WP Smush It: This is counted as one of the best image optimization plugins on WordPress because its pro version simply lets you compress all image formats, may it be JPEG, GIF, or PNG, one by one or maybe in a group with the help of smushing servers.
- EWWW Image Optimizer: This makes use of the lossless technique that is used for optimizing images automatically. The best thing about utilizing this plugin is that it never compromises the quality of the visual ground. Also, users do not need to worry about the optimization of previously uploaded images as EWWW works on them as well.
