How to Optimise Images for the Web: 6 Easy Steps in 2024

Image has become one of the crucial parts of a website, including the content. Yet, incorporating images into your web is not only about putting images and that’s all. You need to know how to optimise images for the web to make them perform well. 

Moreover, image optimisation will enhance your website’s performance since light images will fasten page load, improve SEO practices, and beautify the website visually. 

To understand more about how to optimise images for the web, you can read the detailed explanation below. 

What Is Image Optimisation?

Image optimisation is the process of reducing file size without compromising quality. The intention is to minimise the quantity of data that consumers must download to obtain the desired content more quickly without diminishing quality.

Then, why must you optimise your SEO image? Improperly optimised images are one cause of a website loading slowly. This indicates that the files are so big that they take up all of the storage space on your website and slow down the rest of it.

Though, approximately 70% of respondents say that the speed of a web page loads influences their propensity to make an online purchase. Furthermore, roughly 45% of them will not purchase from a website if the page loads more slowly than they anticipated.

This suggests that optimising images is essential to enhance the page speed and most importantly, user experience. With that, it lowers the bounce rate and hopefully, you get your customers to pay for your business.

Other than user experience, optimised image also maintains the domain servers functioning as intended. At the same time, the optimising image gives you the benefits below:

• Cut down on server storage: Your website's page may load slowly or not at all if the material you display exceeds the suggested size limits. You may maintain the speed at which your visitors expect from your website by keeping minimal image files on your server.
• Improve SEO practices: You can use alt tags on an image's label to increase accessibility and boost SEO.
• Speed the loading of pages: Unoptimised images might cause your website to load slowly, making it unpleasant to use and hard to navigate.
• Maximise user experience: Since the page load is optimised, web visitors will easily access and navigate the site.

Optimising Image Methods

There are many optimisation forms you can try to present the best images for your website, from compression to incorporating alt text. 

If you want to compress the images, you can use these methods:

• Lossy compression: Discarding picture data to facilitate file transfers, storage, and saving. The file size will be much smaller, but you will gradually lose the image quality. The common image format for this compression method is JPEG.
• Lossless compression: Minimising file sizes without significantly removing any data. The image's specific features are stored elsewhere by the compression method, allowing you to return to the original file at a later time. The common image formats are RAW and PNG. 

Other than those technical methods, you can optimise your image by doing as follows:

• Providing image alt text to be more accessible. 
• Scaling and resizing images to make them suitable for tablets, desktop computers, and smartphones.
• Storing image descriptions in the metadata of each file. 

How to Optimise Images for the Web

Basically, optimising the image does not require much effort and expertise. If you are already familiar with the methods, you can directly implement the ways explained above. Yet, if you are new to this, below are how to optimise images for the web:

1. Determine the File Format

Before starting the optimisation, you must understand the types and purposes of image format. This is important for determining the compression methods since different formats require different methods (lossy and lossless). Some common file formats you will encounter are as follows:

• PNG: This format is frequently more effective at maintaining image quality while lowering image file sizes. You can also use and compress images with a transparent background with it.
• JPEG: Compared to a PNG, it has better quality and requires less storage space. However, if you reduce the size of the JPEG image file, some visuals might not always seem as good.
• SVG: All devices, including PCs, smartphones, and tablets, can adjust the size of an SVG file without compromising its quality. However, not all browsers support SVG for accurate presentation.
• GIF: GIF does not cause delayed page loading and does not require as much space or resources on the web server. GIF is perfect for tutorials, demos, or simple graphics. 

2. Downsize Images Before Uploading

Resizing images before uploading is one of the easiest steps to optimise images. You can reduce the file size by cropping or shrinking your photos before uploading. This will make your site load slightly faster. You can also utilise many free tools on the internet to resize the image. 

3. Incorporate Alt Text

Adding alt text can boost your SEO efforts by putting keywords on it as well as improve accessibility. 

A person with vision impairments can comprehend pictures and images by using alt text. It also helps when photos in a tutorial guide don't show up correctly, making the instructions still understandable.

Providing alt text is as simple as filling out the space that appears when you upload an image to an image library. Yet, you can also use HTML if you do not have the alt text or image description feature. 

4. Scale the Image Dimension

The next step of how to optimise images for the web is by scaling the image dimension. You must note that dimensions should correspond in science to the display size. For the background, your images should have a resolution of roughly 1920 × 1080 pixels. A logo's width might range from 100 to 400 pixels, while its height is typically between 50 and 100 pixels.

5. Compress Images

Another way to reduce image size is by compressing it, which you can do before uploading or after adjusting the image by cropping it. Image compression can reduce the file size without missing substantial image quality. There are many free image compression tools on the internet you can use.

6. Use Plugins 

Most of the blog platforms or content management systems, like WordPress, have plugins for image optimisation which downsize images automatically. Plugins also enable you to put an alt tag to the image in a few clicks. 

Conclusion

Those are the A to Z of how to optimise images for the web you can take note of. The process of optimising the image does not take much expertise as long as you understand the method, file format, and purpose of using the images on your web. 

If done well, you can enhance the user experience and improve your SEO strategies. Besides focusing on picture optimisation, you must also focus on other aspects of your site, such as technical and on-page SEO. Regarding this, you can rely on SEO Services by cmlabs. Set a meeting now and tell us your SEO needs for free!