Images and Optimizing Images

Why should you optimize images?

Images, Photographs, and Illustrations on a Website can make a big impact on the information on your web page or post. The Quote “A picture is worth a thousand words” is so very true. But if no one sees the image you are losing out on great content. So an Image is worth a thousand word ONLY when your audience can see it. Many on the web will not wait for it so you are losing out on the Return on Investment if it is never seen.

What is the Best camera you have?  Simple question but it is the one you have with you.  Normally your phone, and today many of our phones can take wonderful pictures. These pictures can be large enough for posters or signage. That being said taking that large image and placing it on your web page can take a long time to load. This Image may be wonderful and fit your content, but if it causes your page or the image itself not to be seen quickly in a browser you could lose your audience in a heartbeat. Today you have a second or two to get people to view your web page and determine if they will stay. Images are one of the top reasons pages load slowly.

WordPress Makes adding Images Easy

WordPress is always trying to make the User experience wonderful, and they make creating pages and post very intuitive for the people building a website. In the same vein, they have made adding images, photos, graphics, and Illustrations as easy as dragging and dropping into the media library. This is great you take a picture want and you can place it where you want it. You even can modify the size that is seen on the page or post. So, how can this be a problem? It becomes a problem when you do this for every single picture you place on your website your load times start to increase. The larger the load times in a browser the slower the file displays, the slower your file displays the slower the user gets to view your page. Or heaven forbid, they leave before your page loads and bounce to another website that has pages that load faster with the similar content.

These are my slides from my WordCampKC 2016 talk in June

Images are easy to add to a WordPress website, but if you add a lot of image to your website you can be slowing down your website if you place the original images.

  • Why should you optimize images
  • How to optimize images
  • Programs to use
  • Plugins that help
  • Ways to determine what size an image should be

Slide Share files

This is a motion graphic I created to talk about images on your website.

And it talks about Using the original image, optimizing the images, or place them on third party vendors.