Tips to Optimize the Images for Your Website in 2021

In order to grab readers’ attention, many bloggers and webmasters will insert some images into their posts. It is good when you want to add some diversity to your content, but what about the webpage loading time and search engine rankings? There are 2 things you need to bear in mind:

• Images with much data or large sizes will take a lot of time to load.
• Images you have uploaded may not be recognized by search engines.

In this respect, we have listed some useful tips to optimize your images for faster page loading speed and higher search rankings.

Optimize Images for Faster Webpage Loading

• Restrict the Number of Images

  Once you have uploaded an image in your post, it will be sent as a separate HTTP request for your readers to fetch or download. Therefore, adding multiple images will take much more time than a single image. For instance, you have added 6 images in your first webpage, each of which is 50KB, and have also added a 300KB image in the second webpage. Although the total image sizes for each webpage is the same, the page loading speed of the first webpage with six separate images will be slower than the webpage with one single image. Because the first webpage needs to send 6 separate HTTP requests, while the second only need to send one single HTTP request. Ideally, you’d better insert no more than 5 images in your article to avoid multiple server requests.

• Re-size Large Images

  Not only will the number of images affect the page loading, but also the image size. So, you’d better always upload smaller image files which can load quickly. But if you really need some large images, you have to resize them before adding to your post.

  In fact, there are a large number of tools available like Picnik and Image Optimizer, which allow you to re-size an image online for image optimization. You only need to import an image and then set the dimension as you want. Besides, with these image re-sizers, you don’t need to compromise on image quality when you reduce the file size.

Optimize Images for Higher Search Rankings

• Rename the Image File

  If you have uploaded an image file of a WordPress logo in your post, but the file name is something like “40450_1517_8025653_n”, then you have to rename this file at once. It is easy for you to identify the WordPress logo by just looking at the picture, but search engines are not smart enough to understand what it is in this image.

• Add Alt Text and Description

  Search engines cannot understand an image with some numerical and alphabets like “40450_1517_8025653_n”, so you have to help the search engine spiders understand each of your images with alt text, file name, and description. To include it, you simply add alt=” the description of your image” to your image tag. For the above example the alt text should be something like the following line:

  img src=WordPress logo.jpg” alt=” WordPress Logo “

Summary

Adding interesting images to your post is undoubtedly useful to attract more readers, but if you haven’t done this in a right way, you may encounter a super slow page loading speed and invisibility in search engine results. Therefore, before inserting these images, you have to optimize them at first by following the above mentioned tips.