You can either use a WordPress plugin, which we’ll look at later on, or an ‘offline’ solution. There are two primary optimization methods at your disposal.

With this in mind, let’s take a look at the specifics involved in optimizing images. It will also save you storage space and cut down on bandwidth usage, as much information needs to be transferred between your site and your visitors. By cutting down the amount of data on your site you can drastically minimize the amount of time needed for it to load. This is where image optimization comes in. Considering that half of all web users expect a site to load within two seconds or less, it’s obvious why large image files can be a problem and negatively impact loading time. The biggest problem with a slow-loading times is the effect it will have on your bounce rate, which refers to the number of people who leave your site before interacting with it. Images file sizes are often big, significantly so in some instances, which will affect your site’s performance and increase load times. While including images on your site will help draw in your visitors (and can do wonders to make even the most complex text more palatable), they do come with downsides. However, you may wonder why you’d bother to do this if the final result looks no different. Image optimization refers to the process of compressing image files to reduce their file size, while retaining as much of their picture quality as possible. Let’s get started! Why Image Optimization Is More Important Than You Might Think We’ll also introduce some solutions to help you (including the ShortPixel plugin), and demonstrate how you can use it to optimize images on your own site. In this article we’re going to take a closer look at image optimization and how it can improve a website’s speed. This is a technique that compresses image files (image compression) and adjusting quality settings to reduce file size from large format to smaller, resulting in quality images which load faster without affecting the overall quality. Forgoing image compression can greatly affect your site’s load times and bandwidth usage, which may lead to increased bounce rates.įortunately, you can avoid these problems by optimizing your image sizes. However, hosting images on your site can have a massive impact on its performance. Images are a great way to make your site more attractive, and can offer depth and context to both your design and content.

Optimize images