If you are a WordPress website user, you may know the benefits of image optimization. Images are the most important content. Images represent the whole website and the main purpose of a website.
Images also help to rank your website by search engine optimization. This element engages more and more audiences by creating a website more attractive. So, as a user, must need to insert a huge number of images to increase visitors and grow your website ranking
To run a flawless website with a sufficient number of images you must need to implement image optimization. As we know, images are important, but many images can slow down your website.
To solve the problem, you will need to optimize all the images which will help to maintain search engine optimization.
In this article, we will talk about image optimization. Then we’ll focus on the benefits of image optimization in SEO. At last, we would like to share some information on the process of image optimization.
Why image optimization is necessary?
Image optimization is a technique for reducing the size of an image. This process mainly works on maintaining the quality of website photographs.
It provides the smallest possible image size. But it tries to deliver the highest-quality photographs in the proper dimensions and format.
So, image optimization is the process of dividing an image into smaller pieces and lowering its resolution. The main purpose of image optimization is to speed up the image loading time. The unoptimized image makes a heavy website. And a heavy or loaded website consumes a huge time to load.
It affects negatively website performance and decreases the loading time of a website. Nowadays, individuals would rather browse a website that loads quickly. As a result, the number of visitors to your website will decrease.
JPEG and PNG are two of the most frequently used image formats. Using JPEG results in a smaller-sized image, but you risk sacrificing part of the image’s quality in the process.
You can also make modifications to get the balance and obtain the desired image quality. On the other hand, although PNG files are larger, they produce images of higher quality.
Benefits of image optimization
Better User Experience
Images are often more essential than written content, particularly in social media. Attractive and fast-loading images play a significant role in gaining and keeping user attention. For fast-loading images, you need to optimize your website’s images.
So, you need to optimize all your site’s images in a proper format. With proper optimization, you can higher quality, leading to an undesirable impact on your content’s appeal. However, using the appropriate tools can prevent this issue.
Reduced Server Storage Usage
When images take less storage on your server, it becomes the most important benefit of image optimization. This not only saves you money but also supports you to reduce other expenses.
The disk space refers to the data capacity allowed by your web host. If your website contains numerous photos and media files, the required disk space equals the total size of all these files. The right file format and image compression type can decrease image size by up to 5 times.
Quicker Website Backups
Backups are very important for any emergency. Due to hacking, accidental deletion, migration to a new host or any other issue, you may need to have your backups. In this situation, it is very helpful if your image files are optimized.
Regardless of the situation, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to have your backup ready to go. Optimized images play a role in speeding up the backup process. It allows you to restore your site’s image files and other content swiftly.
So, the benefits of image optimization refer to the importance of SEO but also for ensuring a smooth recovery in case of a disaster or a change in web hosting.
Better Search Result Rankings
Your success in creating a WordPress website lies in having a higher position in Search Engine Pages. To gain this your website needs a higher ranking which mainly depends on how optimized your website is. Image optimization plays a role in enhancing this visibility.
Optimizing images is important because relevant images provide additional information for search engines. Large images can hurt your SEO rather than a positive one.
Search engines analyze and index images on websites. Large images that slow down the process can lead to lower rankings in search results.
Reduced Bounce Rate
Bounce rate refers to users clicking on a site and leaving without any interaction. It is an important fact in improving your site. High bounce rates can negatively impact your online business or website. So, your main focus has to be on decreasing the bounce rate.
To decrease bounce rate you need to create a content-rich, furnished, and well-optimized website. To create a content-rich website, you just need to insert so many images in different formats. And the huge number of content or large images can slow load your website.
The major concern is a slow websites are the contributor to high bounce rates, as users tend to look elsewhere if content takes too long to open. Larger images significantly increase loading time.
So, to solve all these issues, you need to know about the benefits of image optimization to reducing page loading times and improve user retention.
Increased Traffic
Prioritizing image SEO can significantly boost traffic to your website. Optimizing images enhances the speed, quality, and relevance of your content, impacting how easily search engines discover, crawl, and index your images and, consequently, your entire site.
Achieving a high rank on Google is crucial for attracting more traffic, and SEO, especially image-centered SEO, plays a key role in this process. While it may vary for different businesses, image SEO holds more value for industries where imagery is a significant aspect of user searches, such as fashion, beauty, celebrity news, or travel.
Reduced Bandwidth Usage
Images consume a significant portion of the world’s bandwidth. Image optimization encompasses various aspects, including adjusting resolution, format, and dimensions to keep file sizes small. This optimization leads to decreased bandwidth usage.
While sufficient bandwidth is crucial for a website’s proper functioning, exceeding the limit can be problematic, causing your site to shut down and impacting your business. Adapting images to different screen sizes without adjusting their resolution is not ideal, as the saved loading time may be offset by increased bandwidth usage.
How to optimize images for better SEO?
A lot of people are fond of searching for images online. So, images can gather so much web traffic and it is important for SEO.
There are specific ways to optimize images. Let’s have a look at these ways.
Title
Start by creating a title for your image. This title can serve as the keyword. It can help your webpage to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). So, you need to insert relevant image titles.
This approach will increase the popularity of your business website. Because it helps your business to be discovered online by your target audience or potential customers when they use search engines.
Alt text
It’s important to assist search engines in understanding the substance of your image during this phase. Add alt tags to the images for this. Search engines can identify and show your images on SERPs because of alt tags.
These tags make it easier for visitors to find your website and photos online. <img src=“offload_media_plugin.jpg” alt=” offload_media_plugin_for_WordPress” /> is an example of an alt tag.
Image size
These days, you can get help from a lot of online tools to reduce the size of your images. Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, NET, GIFsicle, JPEGtran, JPEG Mini, OptiPNG, pngquant, FileOptimizer, ImageOptim, Trimage, and ImageResize.org are among the image optimization tools.
All these tools help to reduce image size.
Caption
Create an engaging caption that draws readers in and motivates them to stay on your website longer. It helps to lower the bounce rate. When determining a website’s bounce rate, search engines look at how long a user stays on the page before going back to the search engine.
A high bounce rate causes problems for your website. It has a negative impact on your SEO. Creating compelling captions is essential for keeping users interested and enhancing the functionality of the website as a whole.
Image optimization plugins
Optimizing images is important for accelerating the speed and efficiency of a WordPress website. Large images can slow down page loading times. To solve this issue you can add image optimization plugins that can optimize all of your site’s images in a second.
Image optimization involves reducing file sizes without compromising visual quality. Smaller image files require less bandwidth, resulting in faster download speeds for visitors. Additionally, optimized images contribute to improved search engine rankings.
In WordPress, various plugins and tools are available to automate the image optimization process.
The best 6 image optimization plugins are given below:
- Next3 Offload: You can optimize all images of your website with Next3 Offload. Just enable the image optimization feature to optimize all the images with only one click.
- ShortPixel: Optimize images and create WebP/AVIF versions efficiently. The plugin is a comprehensive, lightweight, stable and frequently updated freemium image compression plugin.
- Imagify: Imagify is the most advanced image optimization plugin. It helps you resize and optimize images.
- EWWW: With EWWW image optimization plugin, you can optimize all your existing images.
- Optimole: Optimole is the all-in-one solution to all of your image optimization requirements.
- TinyPNG: This plugin automatically optimizes all your images. It works by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.
Recommended: As a user, I strongly recommend Next3 Offload to optimize your site images. This plugin provides almost all kinds of optimizing functionalities. You can optimize images, convert webP format and offload files to the Cloud. So it can be an all-in-one solution for your website.
Conclusion
To maintain a website’s performance, you have to know about the benefits of image optimization and use an effective image optimization plugin.
If you want to have a feasible website, especially for any business purpose, you must add clear images with less size.
For this reason, you must go for image optimization which can also help you to search engine optimization for ranking your website and engaging more and more audiences.
You may connect with us on Facebook and X. Also, check out our YouTube channel to view videos.
