How to Optimize Images for Your WordPress Site (Image Optimization)

WordPress is a great platform for your site, but by default, it does not optimize the images you upload to the web. This can make your website load slower, and cause users to leave your site before it finishes loading.

As a beginner in my WordPress website, one of my biggest challenges was how do to make the site load faster? After adding images, my site could load more slowly making it look less professional in google search results.

With time I started learning how to optimize images and surprisingly my website has taken back the path of professionalism. Optimizing your images is a great way to help your site load faster and improve your SEO. But how do you optimize images?

Don’t worry. You can fix these problems without sacrificing the quality or style of your content. In this post, I’ll show you how to optimize images for your WordPress site in order to make the page load faster and improve your SEO (search engine optimization).

Please Note!!! When users visit a page with large images, their browser takes longer to render them, which can make the site feel slow. A slow site can be frustrating for users and cause them to bounce from the site without engaging with it. This, in turn, signals to search engines that the content isn’t what people want and your overall SEO score will decrease.

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Here are My 5 Steps to Optimize Images For Your WordPress Site

Step 1: Get Free Images (Free from Copyright)

Images are one of the most important parts of a WordPress website. For one, they make a site more attractive to visitors. But from an SEO perspective, these images can also contribute to a site’s performance.

It is important that you choose the right ones for your website. Sure, you can take your own photos or pay for stock photography (The problem is that most images you find on the stock web need you to buy the image license from the owner before using it). But another great option is to use free images from websites such as Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. My favorites are Unsplash and Pexels.

Tip

Images are an important part of a WordPress website. They can visually illustrate your content, attract attention, and provide a better user experience. Not only do they grab your visitors’ attention, but they also keep them on your site longer and make more sales.

If you’re wondering why free stock photos are worth your time, here are some reasons why they’re good for SEO and WordPress sites in general:

Reasons for Using Free Images on Your Website/blog

• They make your content more appealing to the eye.
• They’re great for readability, especially on mobile
• Images Make Your Site Look Professional
• They are great for social media posts
• They’re easy to find with keyword searches
• Images Make Your Content More Engaging
• They Can Help You Rank for Image Search
• Images help improve the quality of your content.
• They help you tell a story (a very important aspect of blogging)

Step 2: Edit the Images (Canva – Free)

One of the main reasons why a WordPress website is slow to load is because images are not optimized. This means that their size and dimensions are too big for the web, and that leads to slow loading times.

It’s a good thing you can optimize images both before and after uploading them to your site. The best way to do this is with an image editing tool like Canva.

Canva is a free online editor that allows you to easily resize your images for optimal results on WordPress.

Here are a few key considerations:

File size: The size of your image file will determine how long it takes your visitors to download the image and view it on their screens. You want the smallest possible file size without compromising the quality of the image.

✔ I recommend about 30 KB to 200 KB max. on average I use between 10 KB to 99 KB on my entire site on each image uploaded. Learn about compressing images in step 3.

Dimensions: The dimensions of your image should be as close as possible to the dimensions they’re shown on your site without being larger. For example, if an image is going to be shown at 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels high, it shouldn’t be larger than those dimensions when it’s uploaded.

✔ I recommend images of 800 by 400 pixels (2:1) for in-article images and 800 by 500 pixels (8:5) for featured images.

Resolution: Resolution refers to the number of dots (pixels) per inch (DPI) in an image, but it also affects how large or small an image appears on your site. As with size, you want a resolution that’s small enough to optimize load times without sacrificing quality.

Note!

Web-optimized images will make your website load faster and rank higher in Google search results.

Why edit images before uploading them to WordPress?

• Improves SEO, because search engines prefer images that are optimized for size and load faster
• Consistent Image Sizes Make Your Website Look Professional
• You can use images to add more meaning and context to your content.
• Can improve the overall design of the image, if required
• Makes your website faster, which means a better user experience for your visitors
• Assists you in getting more social shares of your website/images
• You can reduce the file size by 50% or more without any noticeable loss in quality
• If you are selling something, then high-quality images help increase conversions

Step 3: Compress the Images (TinyPNG – Free)

The speed of your website can be affected by the size of the images you upload. If you upload an image that isn’t compressed, it will slow down your website and may also cause other issues. If you want to maintain a fast-loading website, one of the solutions is to compress the images before uploading them to your site.

How do You Compress Images using TinyPNG?

in my case, I use the TinyPNG website (Free with unlimited compressions) to compress all my images after editing them in Canva. After you get free images in step 1, no need to compress them. I would recommend editing them after which you can download a jpeg image (small image size) as png have a higher image size. head to TinyPNG and drop your edited file and it is compressed automatically. Locate the optimized images on the download folder on your pc or mac.

What are compressed files?

Compressed files are generally smaller in size than the original file which makes them easier to share. For example, if you wanted to email a photo to someone, it would be easier to send a compressed version because it would take less time to share. In this case, the original file would be uncompressed and the compressed version would be a smaller file size.

Why compress images?

The main reason for compressing images is to make them load faster on your website. If your images are not optimized for the web, it can slow down your website significantly. This will affect user experience, bounce rate, search engine rankings, and ultimately your sales/conversions.

The best way to compress images is to resize them before uploading them to your WordPress site. By doing this, you can reduce the image size significantly (50-60%) without compromising its quality.

Step 4: Upload and Optimize Images in WordPress

One of the main advantages of WordPress is that it allows you to use plugins and themes to add features to your website or change its design. These features can be created by third-party developers or by community members. If you want to create a professional website, you will need to optimize your images so that they load faster and improve your website’s performance.

How to Uploading Images on WordPress

• Login to the WordPress Dashboard
• On your right-click, media>add new
• Drag and drop a file from your computer

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After uploading the image, you can optimize it by:

• Add alt text and title text for better search engine optimization (SEO)
• Use thumbnails to improve page load times and user experience
• Include captions where appropriate to improve user engagement
• Install an image optimization plugin like WP Smush (Smush optimize image automatically and compressed anytime you add a new image)

Adding images to your blog posts can increase engagement and overall user experience. A study showed that posts with at least one image gained 1,200 more shares than articles without images.

Step 5: Test the Speed of Your Website

There are many ways to test the speed of your website, but all of them have their own drawbacks, such as high costs, lack of support for certain browsers, and so on.

• GTmetrix – If you want to test the speed of your website I would recommend GTmetrix (Free) by just typing your domain>enter and a full analysis is done with instructions on what you need to improve.
• Pingdom Website Speed Test – You can also test the speed of your website using a tool called Pingdom. Enter your URL into the space provided and click “Start Test.” This tool will allow you to test from various locations around the world. It gives you a performance grade and speed insights.
  ✔ In addition to receiving the overall score for your site’s load time, you can see how long each of the elements on your page takes to load.
• Google PageSpeed Insights – this tool tests both the mobile and desktop versions of your website. It gives you a grade from 0 to 100 based on its analysis. It also provides suggestions on what you can do to improve your score, if necessary.

9 Tips to optimize images on WordPress Site

What is Image Optimization?

Image optimization involves reducing the file size of your images without sacrificing quality so that they load faster and consume less bandwidth while providing a better user experience. This can be achieved in several ways including:

• Use the Right Image Format
• Use an Image Compression Plugin
• Optimize Images in Bulk using Batch Compression Tools
• Properly Name Your Images Before Uploading to WordPress
• Add Alt Text and Title Text to Your Images
• Make Sure You’re Not Hotlinking Images
• Add a lazy loading plugin
• Use a content delivery network (CDN)
• Optimize your thumbnails

Conclusion

In this article, we went over a few WordPress plugins that you can use to help optimize your images. Optimizing images for your WordPress site is a simple process. It can be done by using an image-optimization tool like TinyPNG that allows you to compress, optimize, and resize all your images with just one click(1), WordPress plugins like Smush, etc. By doing so, you’ll be able to save your visitors’ time by making your pages load faster, increasing your search engine optimization, and saving space on your site’s server.

These are all great ways to optimize your images to make them smaller, without losing any quality. Hopefully, you’ve found this article to be somewhat helpful and can apply what you’ve learned next time you create a blog post or update your site.

FAQ SECTION

Why are Images Important?

Photographs are worth a thousand words, and this old adage is true for websites. A picture can communicate the message of your content to a user quickly, and it can make all the difference in the world when it comes to conversions.

But what about SEO?

Well, images have a lot of benefits for search engines as well. They help break up long chunks of content and make it more readable. They also help you rank for image searches, and they’re great for social media shares.

Why You Should Optimize Images for Your WordPress Site?

Images make up over 60% of the top 1000 websites’ total page weight. This means that if you have unoptimized images on your website, then it could be slowing down your site significantly.

Optimizing images helps reduce the file size by removing extra data from the image file without compromising the visual quality. This reduces the bandwidth required to load them, which helps your website load faster.

It also means that your web server spends less time processing each page request and uses fewer resources to serve those requests. This can help you save money on hosting costs if you are using a shared hosting environment.

Should you care about the speed of Your Website?

Yes

There’s no question that website load times are the most important part of your user experience. Google has made it clear that speed is a ranking factor, and other studies have found that slow-loading websites can significantly impact your conversion rate.

In general, users expect to wait no more than 3 seconds for a page to load before they abandon it (and remember, every additional second they wait makes them more likely to leave). In fact, an Amazon study found that even a 100-millisecond delay could mean 1% fewer sales.

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Thanks for reading.

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