Visual content. It’s engaging, it’s impactful, it’s pretty much a requirement for any business website in this day and age – but is yours actually losing you valuable web traffic?
It’s a fact that large photo and video file sizes will slow your website down.
A slow website will lose you visitors and business. Web users expect to browse the web quickly and efficiently and research has shown that the average browser abandons a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
The users that abandon your website are not only lost potential customers, they also show up on your website’s bounce rate figure. Your bounce rate impacts your Google page ranking, so your images really can cost you.
We’re not just talking image dimensions here (as much as it’s important that these are optimised according to your website design) we’re talking about the number of Kilobytes ‘KBs’ or worse – Megabytes ‘MBs’ – of space they take up.
Think about it. You have a beautiful, show-stopping image as your main header or background on your homepage. You might also have smaller images that showcase the different services or products you provide, with the aim of attracting users and encouraging them to navigate to further pages.
These images all take up physical space on your web page. So when a user visits your page, that data needs time to load.
But every image adds to your load time, so every image file size counts.
If your file sizes are too large, do you know what happens to those beautiful, show-stopping images used to lure prospective clients in? Well, 40% your prospective clients won’t ever get to see them – they’ve already left your yet-to-be-loaded page.
What’s more, 79% of shoppers dissatisfied with a web page’s performance say they’re unlikely to return, and 44% say they’d tell a friend about a bad online experience.
That’s bad for business.
So how do I analyse my web page speed?
Google PageSpeed Insights allows you to analyse the performance of your web page on both mobile and desktop. It also provides recommendations as to how you can improve your speed.
The one downside of PageSpeed Insights is that the ‘How to fix’ sections are really for the tech-savvy and the recommendations for optimising images are code-based.
How can I easily optimise my website images?
There are a number of ways you can do this. Google suggests utilising the ‘Save for Web (Legacy)’ feature in Photoshop.
Let’s choose the simplest way:
Use the right image formats for web:
.JPG, .PNG, .GIF. The holy trinity.
Put your .TIF, .SVGs and the like away. They are not welcome.
Make sure your image dimensions are suited to your website/CMS
Find out your ideal website dimensions depending on where you are placing your image. E.g. full background or header images are likely to be the full-page width, with featured images in your content likely to be smaller.
You can usually find this information out in your CMS or if you’re using a website design template, it will be in the documentation.
Having images in the right dimensions means your website won’t spend valuable load time trying to resize them to fit their location.
Use a free web-based compression tool such as TinyPNG or Image Smaller.
You simply upload your images into the tools and they remove any unnecessary meta-data and the like, often reducing file sizes by up to 90%!
Tiny PNG even has its own image analyser, which will tell you the number of images it finds on your website, the combined size of these images and then the optimised size, based on the compression TinyPNG can deliver.
What’s a good image file size to aim for?
Well, this depends on the number of images on your web page. For a fast loading page, ideally, all the images on your page will take up less than 500KB.
Optimising your image file sizes is quick, simple and could ultimately make you money by reducing the number of bounces on your website. In 2018, Google announced the speed of your website will actively affect where you rank in Google page listing results on mobile devices, so it is definitely worth ensuring all images on your website are optimised within the recommended file size.
