Images are essential to make a website attractive and engaging, but if they aren’t optimized, they can hurt your performance and impact your Google rankings. In this article, I’ll show you in a practical way how to optimize images to ensure a good user experience while improving your website’s SEO.
✅ Why does image optimization impact SEO?
- Slow sites are penalized in search rankings
- Heavy images increase loading time
- Optimized images also rank better on Google Images, bringing extra organic traffic
- Improved accessibility for users with screen readers
In other words: **optimizing your images improves your website’s performance and visibility at the same time.
1️⃣ Choose the right format
- JPEG: best for photographs
- PNG: great for images with transparency
- WebP: modern format, high quality, smaller size
- SVG: ideal for icons and vector graphics
💡 Tip: WebP can reduce image weight by up to 30% compared to JPEG without losing quality.
2️⃣ Reduce file size
- Set width and height to what is actually needed
- Use compression tools like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, or plugins such as Smush (WordPress)
- Avoid oversized images scaled down with CSS
3️⃣ Write a proper ALT attribute
The alt attribute describes the content of the image, helping Google understand it while improving accessibility.
Example:
html
Top comments (1)
Thanks for sharing!
I would also add
srcsetattribute for<img>tags. Include multiple versions of the same image with different sizes to accomodate all device sizes and save them from loading too big images.