For contemporary websites, the images are the essence. Without them, it is difficult for establishing an impression of long-lasting the visitor. The images aid businesses in engaging the visitors, and bounce rates minimize. However, also they can because web performance is weak. The search engine crawlers such as Bing and Google detest image-heavy and websites’ slow loading. Drastically, the heavy images cause page loading times for increasing. The question arises here is how to increase website speed with heavy images? Actionable steps are below that SEO experts, website owners, online eCommerce shops, and bloggers can utilize for page speed boosting.
Check image quality
The image quality represents on a web page its visual representation. Businesses, particularly those who sell visual products highly are reluctant to its quality reduction for appearing lousy fear to a website visitors. But the image quality reduction correctly failed to affect its quality yet, the file size reduction, and thus, for the visitor, it loads faster.
From 100% to 0%, the image quality is reduced, which have on its file size and appearance a huge impact. The page speed is great yet looks pixelated and grainy for human visitors. Yet, the image quality reduction mainly by 10% to 20% failed to affect any such visible impact mainly on image quality. Meanwhile, it will reduce the file size enough drastically for loading the image faster.
Lossless and lossy compression types
Lossless compression is when the compressing of an image is done, and all of its information is intact. Also, all the data is retrievable upon uncompressing. As all the data is present the lossless compression failed to damage the image quality. But it is required to be uncompressed even before it can be rendered.
Lossy is a compression type in which a compressed image losses its data. This list of data will fail to be noticed by a user and yet, significantly the file size is reduced. After the compression has taken place, then only the original information part is retrievable. This kind of compression is ideal for file formats of JPEG that generally have small file sizes. The compression loses data and the compromising possibility of reduction in image quality.
Image resizing and compression
Image compression is key while there is a requirement for web image optimization. However, this might get tricky and in the case failed to be done correctly then can surely affect the picture qualify.
- Image resizing- While discussing the image resizing, there is a need to talk related resizing it and not shrinking it implicitly with the usage of CSS and HTML that is applied, when the rendering is done by the browser on the web page. Just like that several developers overlook the resizing of the image need concerning the layout of the website. Images that are sized mainly for an old design will not be the right dimensions chiefly for the new website design.
- Image dimensions- There is a widespread misconception that a large pixel size image guarantees web page quality.
Use image optimization tools
There are several paid and free image editing software available that can be used chiefly for image optimization for performance. When it comes to choosing which to use directly up to the user preference.
Right file format
- JPEG or simply joint photographic experts group mainly has an image quality as a lower comparison to PNG while also reducing file size. It uses both lossless and lossy compression algorithms and is used widely in images of digital cameras.
- PNG or simply joint photographic experts group is generally used when lossless compression is utilized. There is a very high-quality image and as of this so is the file size.
- The website developers mainly argue over whether be use PNG or JPEG. The PNG files are chiefly of higher quality, and the background is removed from the images, which fails to be possible in JPEGs. However, JPEG can be easily compressed, and therefore, the file size is smaller.
- GIF or simply graphics interchange formate uses the only lossless format and for animated images is ideal as its relatively file size as smaller. The GIFs across the interest are popular for animated pictures displayed on blog posts and social media. It is a powerful covering way of short messages and for an effect more comical in comparison to pictures.
Conclusion
It can be concluded that according to google the pages taking over 10 seconds for losing might increase the bounce rates approx 123%. Websites with image-heavy then struggle for increasing page speed, and thus their webpage bounce rates boost. Following these best practices and actionable tips are the ways how to increase website speed with heavy images. It not only offers a great user experience but does rank higher in pages of search engine results and gets more traffic to the site.