6 Tips to Optimize Images For WordPress Website

Tips to Optimize Images For WordPress Website

Do you optimize images for WordPress website?

Images are a very important aspect of the webpage. It helps you to increase your readability as well as share your content across the web. However, images also increase the size of your page. That’s why you should optimize images for the WordPress website.

In this guide, we’ll learn 6 tips to optimize images for WordPress website to optimize performance?

Why we Should Optimize Images for WordPress?

Image optimization is the process of finding a perfect balance of reduced size and quality image. The use of optimised image helps you to save storage, bandwidth as well as improves load-time of your WordPress site. In addition to that optimising image will also improve the search engine rank of your website and provide a better user experience. Another benefit is that you’ll need less server storage and fewer resources.

Use Image CDN by Jetpack

Content Delivery Network serves Using a CDN is useful if your website receives a lot of traffic. It is the most effective tips to optimize images for WordPress website. You can use image CDN by Jetpack to serve all images from cloud network. This will ultimately result in an increase in the site’s speed as well as optimize performance.

Choose Correct Image format

The image file format affects the total image size and optimization. That’s why you should choose image format very carefully. This tips to optimize images for WordPress website is simple and easy to implement.

JPEG image format is good for images with millions of colors like photographs. It is so because JPEG image has a small size and high quality. Also, it can be resized and compressed without losing the quality of images.

PNG image format produces beautiful looking images for a smaller size. However, the old browser like IE6 doesn’t support PNG. It is perfect for the logos, and other vectored images.

I recommend you to use JPEG as a file format. If you want to insert a short video on a webpage then make sure that the video is GIF instead of MP4.

Use Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a technique in which images are loaded only when visitors scroll down to view the image. It reduces the bandwidth and decreases the loading time of the page. If you need to upload multiple images in a single blog post then lazy loading can be extremely effective optimize images. You can use a3 lazy load plugin do perform this task.

Use Image sitemaps   

You can use image sitemaps to index images on search engine like google. When you add the image sitemaps, google gets metadata of it. While adding sitemap owner must add relevant details like type of image, subject matter, caption, title, geographic location, and license. This increases the probability of displaying your image in the image search by almost 50%.

By doing this you can make sure that search engine crawls images from your website. You can generate image sitemaps by using Yoast SEO plugin or Google sitemap generator.

Properly Resize and Compress Images

The total size of an image is the combination of the size and file size. Large images can slow down your website. Hence, you should properly resize images for the optimal display before uploading it. You can resize images using tools such as photoshop.

Compressing image is very important tips to optimize images for WordPress website. It removes unnecessary information from the images. Almost 90% size can be reduced by image compression. You can easily compress the image with the help of image optimization plugins.   I recommend you to compress and resize images using EWWW optimization plugin.

Add Alt Text and Caption

The alt text appears in place of an image, in case the image can not be displayed. It also provides the image description to search engines crawlers. You should use a keyword in the alt text.

Adding captions to an image is optional. Most of the visitors read the caption over the content. Hence, if possible you should add a short and relevant caption to an image.

Wrapping up

To wrap up, these are the tips to optimize images for WordPress website. I hope you find this article helpful. If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

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