Today’s modern website design feature sophisticated content management systems (CMS) that allow you to load content such as images, pages, posts, etc. Often we have clients who upload their own images to their websites for blog posts.
Many times they load the full image size onto their website. This presents several performance and maintenance issues they can have with their website.
Images often are taken on high-resolution formats. Even today’s smartphone can now take quality high-resolution photos.
Uploading these can consequence to your website design and performance. High-resolution images also mean large file sizes. These large file sizes can have issues with the performance of your website design:
- It can hurt search engine optimization (SEO) and user engagement by longer download times. Let’s face it people and search engines don’t want to wait for large file size images to download, they will go elsewhere.
- Continuously adding large file size images to your website can make the overall website size larger. This becomes a challenge in the long run to backup and store backup files of your website.
Tips on Website Design Image Optimization
Reducing the image file size is important for a high performing website design. Using tools such as Microsoft’s Paint program or Apple’s Preview can help you change the size of your images. More advanced tools such as Adobe’s Photoshop not only allow you to change the image size but put n creative effect to the image.
Here are some recommendations on website design image sizes:
- Full width: 2400 pixels (px) wide or 1920px for high definition screens.
- If you are using an image that on covers half the screen then 1200px wide is good
- Placement photos such as biography photos are not wider than 600px
- File sizes: full-width 100K-200K ideal, less than 100K best, smaller widths should be smaller file sizes than full width.
If you have reduced your image widths but still see a file size that you think is too high then you might want to consider using an image compression tool. An image compression tool takes the image file and runs it through an optimization process to reduce any waste on the image file. Depending on the format and equipment the image was taken file compression tools can reduce image file sizes by 80%.
There are several image file compression tools out on the Internet to use. We recommend trying out Image Compressor from Website Planet. This is a free tool that allows you to upload your resized images and they will do the compression automatically, show the results, and allow you to download the compressed image files.
Success Media Services can help your online marketing efforts by designing a right-sized digital marketing strategy for your organization. Our services include website design, SEO, social media campaigns, and video content. Contact us today to see how we can grow your business on the Internet.