Images are very important to have on a website. People are visual learners, and if you don’t have this type of media, your website is only going to be text-heavy. This means that it won’t even look interesting at all to your potential visitors. It’s a powerful means of communication that websites can’t forego if you wish to stay competitive.

Once you’ve chosen the right images to incorporate into your content, this means that you’re one step ahead. But remember that it doesn’t just end there.

There are certain metrics you’ll have to comply with as regards the photos to make these powerful for your website and abide by the standards of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). One of these is to optimize your website images to make them the right size. In fact, image optimisation forms part of an SEO audit to ensure that the images are all working positively for your website.

This means taking additional effort to resize, but it’s one that can’t be neglected. It’s very important to have correctly-sized website images, for reasons like these enumerated below:

1. It Enables Your Business Website to Optimise Thumbnails

If you’re running a website for your e-commerce store, then this first importance speaks volumes to you. When your images are of the right size, this means that you’re also able to optimise your thumbnails.

Generally, to save up on space and to maximise a single page, your e-commerce site is going to have a drop-down list, in grid form, that contains all the thumbnails of the products that belong to a certain category. These should be small enough so as to have so many products on one page, but also of good quality and size to make for easy browsing of your customer. Before they even click on that thumbnail, your customers must already have a clear preview of the product.

This is what you can achieve when your website images are sized correctly with the help of an expert technical SEO consultancy firm. If not, the image may be unclear to your customers that they’ll have to individually click through each photo to have a clearer view of the item. This can make their buying experience unpleasant, which may only encourage your customers to leave your e-commerce site in favour of another one with clearer thumbnails.

2. It Results in Better User Experience

Images matter a lot in today’s competitive e-commerce industry, as this is the way to get your site noticed. Most importantly, it can also improve the user experience when the images are appropriate to the content and are sized correctly. This relates to your overall website design, as well.

Remember that the images you put in should be there for a purpose. At the very least, these images must be able to convey a message to the website visitor even just by looking at it.

For example, if you’re in the hotel industry, your photos should give your visitors insights on how it looks, how comfortable it might be, and even the size. These can shape customer decisions.

With this purpose in mind, it’s necessary to have correctly-sized images, or else the purpose isn’t going to be achieved. When wrongly sized, the picture may only end up looking distorted or pixelated. Rather than conveying a message by giving a virtual view of the rooms, your would-be customers have an unpleasant experience with trying to have their own guesswork of how the room really looks like.

Because of that unpleasant user experience, rather than booking your room, your customers might walk away simply because they were unable to make a judgment as to their preference because the photo was unclear.

3. It Keeps Page Loading Speed Optimized

One of the metrics that can hurt your page rankings is your page loading speed. People who are using the Internet to have answers to some of their common questions want to have their problems addressed right away. This means that there’s no time to wait for a super slow page to load. Generally, a website will only have a few seconds before an irritated website visitor will leave that website to look for another one that may potentially load faster.

If you notice that your page has been loading quite slow lately, one of the culprits might be heavy images and even videos. While these are nice to have, when you have too many that are heavy in size, this can severely affect your page loading speed.

To help you make that improvement, here are a few pointers you can apply, so you can make the right file size images:

• Don’t resize photos in HTML, as you’re only giving more work to the server by crunching the photos while it’s loading – the effect is page loading speed will only go slower.
• Quality photo images are usually with the JPEG extension (.jpg).
• Use compression software to resize your images accurately.

4. It Increases Dwell Time

On the opposite spectrum of website visitors bouncing off your site because of poor page loading speed is something known as dwell time. This refers to how long a single website visitor stays or dwells on your site. In SEO, the longer, the better. This means that your website visitors are interested enough in what you have to say or offer, such that they stay for long to learn more. At the end of dwelling longer on your website, this also increases the likelihood of a sale being closed.

Optimised images based on size and quality can help increase dwell time. This is because your images are clear enough to convey a positive image, which can keep your website visitors interested in your site. Remember that the best images should offer more than just aesthetic value – they should also be informative to your web visitors.

Conclusion

The World Wide Web is a high-image medium. This means that many Internet users are finding websites more appealing when they have images. Think of all the social media sites gaining popularity, which are all essentially image-sharing sites. That fact alone should speak volumes about why it’s important to incorporate the right images in your website.

Going even deeper, you’ve got to ensure that the image size is the right one. Otherwise, instead of bringing in positive results to your website, the presence of these images may only be detrimental to your rankings. The enumeration above should be strong enough to convince you about how important it is to ensure that all your images are of the right size.

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