People like fast websites; search engines like fast websites. Everyone on the Internet likes to be loaded quickly.
Think about how you use the Internet: If you especially want to buy things, waiting for 10 seconds to load the page may be very frustrating.
As an owner of an e -commerce website, how can you easily increase the speed of online stores?
By optimizing all your network images.
Why is this important? How do you start, what do you have to do? You will find all the answers to these questions below.
Why is the website speed important to your online store?
According to a survey of Kissmetrics, 79% of the online shoppers who have doubts about the performance of the website stated that they would no longer return to the website for purchase
. This is a large percentage.
Search engine will punish the slow online store -but more importantly, the same is true of users. They left the website without buying and never returned.
If your website is not loaded as soon as possible, you may lose sales opportunities.
How fast is your website?
As fast as possible.
This may sound vague, but please consider the following statistics:
47% of people want the web pages to load within two seconds or shorter.
40% of visitors will give up pages that take three seconds or longer to load.
Need me to say more?
Website visitors do not need to wait for the page to load, and they should not wait.
How do you know the speed of your website?
There are several free tools on the Internet to scan your website and provide you with speed scores, and gradually segmentation of the biggest problem, and how to improve them.
Google’s Page Speed \u200b\u200bInsights allows you to understand the loading situation of your website on the desktop and mobile devices.
Pingdom Page Speed \u200b\u200bexplained your page size and loading time.
GTMETRIX includes useful visual effects and prioritize speed issues.
So how to speed up your online store?
One of the best starting points is to optimize your network image.
The picture occupies more space than any other part of the website, especially when it involves online stores.
They are some of the \”heaviest\” and the most difficult files for server processing. Their size and quality can determine or destroy your web performance.
In turn, this will affect the time where people stay on your website
and How much transformation is.
A lighter image will bring faster websites, happier customers and more sales. Where will you start?
Step 1: Save the image in the correct format
The two most commonly used image formats are portable network graphics (PNG) and combined image expert group (JPEG or JPG).
What is the difference?
In short, the quality of PNG is better and allows transparency, but their image files are larger. JPEG is not so good in the quality department, but their image files are usually much smaller.
PNG is also non -destructive, which means that you can edit and save images multiple times and the quality will not be reduced. On the other hand, every time it is re -saved, JPEG will be damaged and the quality will decrease.
When should I use each format?
In most cases, JPEG will be your best choice because they are good compromises between image quality and file size.
As a good rule of experience, when will the subdivisions of each format be used.
When to use PNG:
For images with a transparent background
For opaque images
For more Small images, such as logo or icons
For images with text
For screenshots or images that do not use many different colors
When you want to keep a detailed image When the quality is quality, the size of the file is not important
HeUse JPEG:
For images with many different colors, such as photos and realistic images
For product images and backgrounds
Step 2: Adjust the image size
When you upload a 3,000 pixel wide image to your product page, your browser workload will double.
The browser must first load the original 3,000 pixel images, and then reload the reduction of the image that is suitable for the area to be uploaded.
For example: if the width of your website content is 800 pixels, the browser of the visitor must Load 3,000 pixel images plus 800 pixel images. Multiply this process to the number of images you own on a single webpage. See how this quickly becomes a very terrible question?
Before uploading any picture to your website, check the size you need carefully.
For example, on the WOOCOMMERCE website, the product image is displayed as 460 pixel x 460 pixels.
Important reminder: The size and image size of the image file are two different things.
The image size (460px x 460px) is shown in the figure above. The size of the image file is the actual file (for example, 92,461 kb). This is the amount of space required to store images on the server. The larger the file, the longer the image is loaded.
You want to ensure that most of the images on your website are not more than 150 kb, but it is best to be less than 100 KB -Depending on the purpose of the image
How do you determine how much image size is needed?
If you use Google Chrome, you can use the Inspector tool to help you determine the size of the image.
Navigation to your site and right -click the area where its width is needed. Then click \”Check\”.
A toolbar will pop up at the bottom. You will be able to sort the HTML part of the website, hang the mouse above them, and then check the width of this part.
Therefore, for example, if you want to add pictures in a blog article, you need to know the maximum width of the content area so that you can upload the picture to the size or smaller.
Open the inspector tool to determine the space of the image. In the following example, your image will occupy 1,080 pixel width. Now you know that in order to prevent the web browser from loading two images of different sizes (as described above), you must adjust the size of the image to 1,080 pixel width or smaller
.
Step 3: Save you for web Image Most image editing software has a \”saved as a network\” option to help adjust the file size of the image.
To \”save as a web\” in Photoshop, please transfer from the menu bar at the top of the screen to \”File\” \u0026 GT; \”Export\” \u0026 GT; \”Save as web\”.
Your software usually allows you to switch the image quality bar to find a suitable medium between the file size and image quality.
In Photoshop, you can view the image on the side screen. The original image is located on the left, and the newly saved image preview is located on the right.
In the screenshot below, I highlight the image quality switch bar. You need to adjust the image to the size of the file as small as possible, and pay attention to the quality of the image.
The arrow in this screenshot points to the size of the image file. Please note that the lower the quality, the smaller the file size.
Please remember, you don’t want granular and pixel images. This is why the preview on the right is important before saving the image.
Other image editing tools with this option: Sketch: https://www.sketch.com/ pixlr: https: // pixlr. COM/
Step 4: Run the image via compressor
image compressor will remove unnecessary information in the image, such as camera details, metadata, color configuration files, embedded Summary diagram and so on.
Doing this will reduce the file size of the image, Will not affect its quality.
You can use WordPress plug -in (such as SMUSH Image Compression and Optimization or EWWW Image Optimizer) to compress them in batches or automatically compress them when uploading images to your website.
If you have Mac, please ImageOptim for free ].
You can also use free online image compressors, such as TinyPng or Kraken.
There is no time to follow all these steps? There is another option: to deliver the network with free content of Jetpack. Jetpack comes with a free content delivery network (CDN) called Site Accelerator, which will automatically adjust the size, compress, and provide images from high -speed data centers from all over the world.
It is easy to set up with one -click installation and provide additional benefits, such as accelerating the delivery of CSS and JavaScript files.
To set it:
If you haven’t used it yet, please install the free Jetpack plug -in.
finished! The image acceleration function is suitable for existing images and new images, so you will immediately start to see the speed improvement.
You may also want to use Jetpack’s Lazy Images function. The inert image only loads the image visible on the page to the site visitors, and delay loaded the image outside the screen until the user rolled down. This is particularly useful for mobile devices that need to consider bandwidth. Activity:
Turn to Jetpack \u0026 GT; Set \u0026 gt; Performance . Rolling to Performance and speed .
Switching the image
Delayed loading
.
In summary
Online stores need to pay special attention to their picture size, because these pictures are essential for selling their products. Please remember to make the image file as small as possible without sacrificing quality.This is one of the easiest ways to increase the speed of stores and help you turn more traffic into sales.
