The #1 cause of slow-loading pages is website images that are not optimized. If you compress your images, then you will see an improvement in your website page speed. That means better SEO rankings for the site! Here’s how you can optimize your images in two quick steps:
- Make sure the dimensions of your image (width X height) are no larger than the largest dimensions you show on the site. For example, if you know that your icons will be 100x100px, then don’t upload a 5000x5000px image as your icon. You can use whichever software you are the most comfortable with, but we recommend using Photoshop.
- Your images can have reasonable dimensions, but still be too large of a file size. Use an image compression service, like Imagify, to compress the file size of your images. This will ensure that fewer resources are used to load your page and that your page loads at lightning speed.
If your client has a lot of images on their website, then focus on optimizing any repeating images first. These include: website logo, header images, profile photos, icons, and any graphics that are used in more than one place. After you have the repeating images taken care of, you can start working through the remaining images in your Media Library.
You can also do a speed test using tools.pingdom.com to see exactly how much your image size is negatively impacting your client’s website(s). If you rather someone else handle this type of work for you, feel free to reach out to one of our SEO experts!
