There are three primary aspects of optimising images for website design:
• Focusing on visual excellence;
• Achieving fast image loading time; and
• Enhancing search engine indexing of images.
Many websites make good use of at least one of these practices. However, if you utilise a combination of all three, you will be rewarded by a site displaying optimal levels of quality web design that brings excellent SEO results. If you have an e-commerce site, you can take your own photos of your products with a basic camera and upload them to your web pages.
By using such techniques as creating a lightbox, you can produce high-quality images with good lighting. If you need graphics for your site, you can design your own infographics using tools like PiktoChart or Canva. With Logo Creator, you can create an engaging and recognisable logo for your brand. Even if your website is a blog or a personal interest site, you will benefit greatly from optimising every image that you include in your content.
Ways to Optimise Your Images for High-Quality Website Design
The most effective ways to optimise the images that you include in your website content include the following:
1. Use Only Excellent Quality Images. If your website is a blog, forum or personal interest site, you can download photos taken by experts from numerous stock photography domains. On most of these sites, you can download free images for use on commercial or personal web pages. Top-grade stock photo websites today include Unsplash, Pixabay, PicJumbo and SplitShire.
After downloading an image from a stock photo site, you will most likely need to compress it for use in web design. You can reduce the image size and then upload the smaller size to your site. Since it is definitely easier to reduce an image size than to increase it, you should not have major problems with this step.
2. Resize Images for Best Page Speed Optimisation. Large photos with high resolution on your site can decrease the loading speed of your web pages. This will interfere with your web visitors’ onsite experience, especially for mobile device users, and it can lower your site’s SERPs ranking. You need to determine the ideal balance between size and resolution.
A good size for a website image file is 125KB (kilobytes) or less. Online, the height and width of a photo are measured in pixels, and the average quality image on a blog or e-commerce site is around 795×300 pixels for good optimisation.
The resolution of an image is its density or quality. This is calculated in dots per inch (dpi). While quality printing may require images of 300dpi, the majority of computer or mobile device screens display 72dpi or 92dpi best. This lower image density will provide an ideal resolution for consistently good onsite viewing.
3. Choose the Right File Type and Name Images Correctly. In general, any photographs that you upload to your website should first be saved as JPGs. This will keep the image file size relatively small while enabling clear viewing of true colours in your image. Most graphics should be saved as PNGs, especially if they contain large and flat coloured areas.
PNG files keep both the linear and spatial areas of colour and text crisp and true, allowing for good zooming quality, and they support the use of transparent background fields. For best colour and quality, save your PNG files as 24-bit format instead of 8-bit. For good results when naming your image files, use the numbers 0 to 9 and lowercase letters only. Omit all spaces and punctuation, and make use of hyphens in place of underscores.
4. Input Image Captions and Alternative Text. Alt tags, or alternative text fields, for your images will not be visible on the pages of your site. However, you should input these fields to provide search engines with basic information about your images for better SEO. Use a phrase that best describes each photo, and include a targeted keyword.
Adding concise image captions is also helpful for improving your site’s SEO. Also, many web users read photo captions although they may just scan other textual content on a web page. Overwriting image file names, alt tags and captions may result in penalties from major search engines, so remember to be clear, but relatively brief.
