In the digital world, images are amongst the most influencing elements to create engaging web experiences. They don’t only provide an amazing UX on your WordPress site but also get web traffic and conversions.
The only way to make them work for your business success is to get them right on your site instead of piling them up carelessly. Handling images on a website is not an easy task so can become complicated if not given appropriate attention.
In this article, I shall discuss all the information that you need to know for Image Optimization for your WordPress site. Prior to this, let’s understand the importance of image optimization below:-
- helps to increase page load speed
A website having less than 2-3 seconds page load speed is well-appreciated by end users. And, if you are optimizing images on your WordPress store, you are cutting down on more than half of its weight that eventually decreases page load speed.
- enhance SEO rankings
SERPs are hugely affected by fast loading websites. So, Image optimization equals to lesser page load times that ultimately enhance SEO ranking.
- increase website conversions
If your SEO ranks are enhanced, you can easily grab users’ attention who possibly trust your website and bring you more conversions.
- create more engaging UX
As image optimization is helpful in the above-mentioned points, you are ultimately creating a smooth user experience.
How can you Optimize Images for Enhancing WordPress Performance?
For an overall website performance optimization, you can hire WordPress developer who will provide you better insights on things where you are lagging behind. Apart from this, if you are specifically targeting on Image optimization, below are some steps to follow:-
. Using Responsive Images
This functionality is offered as default one and was introduced with WordPress 4.4 version. It utilizes srcset attribute to provide the browser with a list of various images of different sizes to choose from.
This way browser will load an appropriate size of the image depending upon the size of users’ device instead of downloading and bringing heavy image file every time.
For instance, if users are browsing on their mobile devices, they will receive a smaller size of image in srcset attribute. It works by setting srcset code to add images automatically. This process is popular as it doesn’t interfere with any other plugin or theme of your WordPress site.
. Using Image Optimization Plugins
In WordPress plugin repository, there is all kind of WordPress image optimization plugins available. You can easily get them to compress or optimize your images. Image resizing or lazy loading, everything can be easily achieved by WordPress plugins.
To name a few, reSmush and WP Smush are the most popular ones for image optimization. However, there are multiple others available. You can choose the one that complements your requirements the most.
. Performing Image SEO
Image SEO? Yes, you heard it right. There are several image attributes that contribute to SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). For instance,
Alt Text: important from the accessibility aspect of your WordPress site. Try to write a succinct description of your image.
Title of Image, Image Caption, Image Sitemaps, and more.
To wrap this piece of writing, I would like to state that images play a vital role. So, you need to put them in your priority list while aiming to optimize your WordPress site’s performance.
In case you wish to know more about the process of image optimization then you can contact me anytime. I would love to handle your queries and concerns.
Top comments (2)
That's awesome tips here to speed up WordPress performance.
Another very important point on SEO is the optimization and compression of images on the site. Here is an interesting article on this topic: optipic.io/en/blog/images-seo-opti...