Sunday 19 February 2017

Why is Optimising Images on your WordPress Website Essential?

Humans are visual creatures. Our brains process information that comes to us from visual mediums -like pictures, GIFs, and videos- much faster than they do from words or even sounds. You could create reams of excellent content for your website, but it will never generate as much interest as lower quality content with a picture attached to it. 

That’s the reason why your WordPress website should feature as many pictures as possible to improve user experience (UX) and make it easier for you to engage with incoming visitors.

Why is optimising images on your WordPress site crucial?

 
Images, especially HD ones, are big and require a lot of storage space and bandwidth to download. Some images are worth pages of text. If you don’t optimise a picture, it sometimes takes several seconds more for a web page to load. Statistics tell us that most website visitors don't have the patience to wait for more than 4-5 seconds for a webpage to load.


 If it doesn't load that quickly, they will abandon the website and go to another. By optimising images, you can compress them and get the web page to load fast. Compressing them also doesn't spoil the picture quality – you can display gorgeous photos to visitors to catch their attention. 

Wordpress website




Optimising images helps with SEO


On-page optimising techniques are good for SEO. When you optimise an image, you are asked to place an ‘ALT’ text on it. ‘ALT’ is the alternate text that explains what the image is about and is displayed when the image doesn’t load. Search engines like Google use the ‘ALT’ text for indexing. If you have optimised a lot of pictures, your site is likely to gain many rankings. Also, you are more liable to generate incoming traffic from image searches.  


On most websites, images occupy over 63% of a site's size. The more you can compress the images, the less space they will fill and the faster the site will load. You can use tools like Photoshop to compress them. Alternatively, if you want your site to have good SEO, you can hire dedicated developers to do it for you. 

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