Optimizing images and graphics for your website
The beauty of using a DSLR camera (the fancy digital camera) is that it produces a high quality image. That is always the goal HIGH QUALITY. However the size of an image or graphic is important too.
Optimizing Images For Your Website
You must resize the images to fit the dimensions of the space that it is going in. It is like trying to fit my size 11 foot in a size 9 shoe... it's not going to be pretty. Unlike shoes some of the newer technologies are responsive and it will automatically resize the image to fit in that space. BUT the consequence is super slow load times. Trust me “aint nobody got time for that”! People do not want to wait for your images to load… which means they will keep scrolling or push the exit and leave your site… the goal is for them to stay, to click, to love everything, and to BUY!
Here are a few tips on how you can optimize your images to increase your website performance.
Follow The Recommended Settings
Recommended Pixel widths for Squarespace websites:
• Resize banner style images to 1800-2000 px width
• Resize images on a page to 1500 or less px width
How can you resize images?
Photoshop or Canva (free) are great places to resize an image width.
File Size
Another big contributor to lags on a website is large file sizes. Your images and graphics should be optimized for the web (not for printing).
Web size images should be 500 KB or less.
It is important to note that typically PNG files (transparent backgrounds) and larger than JPEG files. If you need to resize a file you can use these helpful websites for free!
www.Tinypng.com - This website compresses the size of the PNG file while preserving the transparent background.
www.Tinyjpg.com – This reduces file sizes for JPEGS.
Naming Your Images
Naming an image helps with your SEO (search engine optimization). All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have primary search results, where web pages and other content are shown and ranked based on what the search engine considers most relevant to users.
Naming Images
FOR SEO RESULTS
When Google is searching for valuable content to send to their users they look on your site for different words that fit what was being searched for. If someone googles "APPLES" and you don't have information about Fruit, specifically apples you will not show up in the search results. If you name your images something relevant to what is happening in the image or on the page that it is on, it is more likely to increase your good vibes with the SEO secret service! Basically you are helping Google and other search engines find you.
Straight out of the camera an image might have a name like D610-0125.jpeg. Or I have seen image that were downloaded from Facebook with file names like 45874cedsd54865dfd.jpeg. THAT MEANS NOTHING to the Google Bots.
Name images something descriptive like Granny_Smith_Apples.jpeg. This will give you better chances of being found in the google world. (PS. It helps for Pinterest too).
Wondering why any of this is important? The more of your people who can find your website, the more money you make! Simple.
Put this knowledge to the test and see how much faster your site preforms.
Hey Girl Hey! I am Chanel and I work with boss babes and creative entrepreneurs who want to stand out from the crowd and take their brand to the next level. I am a Photographer, SquareSpace Web Designer, and Brand Stylist so basically I can help you with #AllTheThings! If you are ready for an upgrade Let's Chat