Great images are important part of your website. Images add visual appeal to a website and make it more engaging for your visitors. The right images make it easier for visitors to understand what you are trying to tell, reinforce branding and make the website more memorable.
But images are also quite ‘heavy’ and can make the website load slower. Can, if you do not optimize them. The ‘weight’ of images in Kb or Mb depends on their size and their optimization. Size is normally expressed in pixels (like 1200x800px). And optimization is normally done by compressing the images.
So, what are the best practices in using images on your website?
Use correct size of images for website
There is no reason in uploading a 5 Mb file 5000×4000 pixels, if this will be only a small image on the website. In some browsers you can right-click and inspect an image on your website to see what exact size it should be. But as a general rule, no image on your website should be more than 2500 pixels on either size. Uploading larger image will not make it look better on the website (often on the contrary).
Optimize your images
There are tools that will help you reduce the size of your images while preserving their high quality. Sometimes the reduction of size can be 10 times of even more.
The best practice as of 2023 is using .webp images.
Free online tool to resize and optimize your images for the website
While there are lots of professional and beginner tools to use, there is one extremely easy and effective free online tool https://bulkresizephotos.com/ .
Just upload your file, indicate the size you need and level of optimization, and you immediately get what you came for for free! Best thing? You can upload your files in bulk, and the tool will give them back to you in an archive.
For best results after you upload your file switch to “Width” to indicate the desired width of your final image, set image quality at 80%, choose webp as your output file, and uncheck ‘Transparent background’ if you don’t need one.
Hit ‘>Start’ and you will see your optimized and resized files being downloaded.
Just look how I optimized a photo for “About Us” page by 100x!
