Images on your website can make a huge difference in how visitors respond to your online presence. They can be used to break up text, giving readers something other than a page of words to stare at. In order for the images to be effective, they must be used appropriately: meaning correctly optimized photos meant for use online.
What Does Optimize Mean?
Creating new images for your web page is a good way to help set it apart from competitors. Editors such as Photoshop and Illustrator allow consumers to manipulate the image file in a variety of ways. However, that ability can make the file sizes very large.
If you were to add large images to your web page, it would take an incredibly long time to load. Current clients and potential customers would become frustrated and probably stop visiting your site. In order to combat this problem, you need to optimize photos for website use.
Image optimization is saving the file in a format and size that makes it easy for browsers to load. When an image is created, there are several pieces of background information that go with it. This information includes descriptors such as author name and creation date. This optimization process works by reducing the excess information stored with your image, making the overall file size smaller.
Why Should You Optimize Photos for Website Use?
A slower loading website might not seem like a big deal. However, if your business sells several different products, each with their own picture, it becomes a problem. Surveys recently showed that approximately 90 percent of all websites are image based. With all those graphics, it becomes important to have them optimized in order to have the site load correctly every time.
Additionally, if you plan on sharing any of the images from your website to your social media sites, properly optimized images will appear nicer on these sites. Many social sites, including Facebook and Pinterest, will auto-format incorrectly sized images in the publishing process, at times cutting off portions of your carefully chosen and shared image.
For the best presentation of your business in the digital world of the Internet, it is important to optimize and use images correctly on your web page and blog posts.