Imagery plays a pivotal role in websites. Since most visitors use a site’s visuals to decide if it is worth their time, it is vital that you optimise and regularly audit the images that are on your site.
Why Does Image Optimisation Matter?
Before doing an image optimisation audit, it is important to know why image optimisation matters and why site owners, developers, web designers, and SEO teams need to include this on their list of priorities.
All Websites Are Visual
Notice how whenever a website has been revamped there are more images on the new and improved site. Website revamps rarely go from more images to less.
This is because everyone likes images that tell a story and are relatable. Web designers know this universal fact. It is therefore critical that all images and videos on your site are enhanced.
Mobile and on the Go
Today, there is more online activity from mobile phones than computers. Mobile browsing has become the most convenient way for people to access sites and information.
Despite vast improvements in internet-ready smartphones, we still encounter issues when loading mobile versions of pages. For example, some sites’ images take a long time to load on mobile phones. Image optimisation for mobile sites is essential especially if you want to cater to all audiences, even users with slower and older mobile phones.
Page Speed Is Important
Slow websites are a turn-off. Users will not revisit your site if it spends a lot of time buffering and images take a long time to load or don’t load correctly. If you have images on your site that are not optimised for mobile phones, it will negatively impact your user experience. This leads to visitors quickly leaving your site and can even hurt your ranking.
Don’t Let Your Images Go To Waste
Good images don’t come cheap. You might have already spent a considerable amount on beautiful branded images for your site. Don’t let that expense go to waste. Make sure that all your images are optimised for computer and mobile browsing.
How To Perform an Image Optimisation Audit
Stage 1 – Prepare an Image Inventory
Before even attempting to identify or drill down on image optimisation concerns, you need to do an inventory of all the images you’ve used and plan to use on your site.
There are a lot of image inventory apps that you can use. Do a search, go through the reviews, and identify one that best suits your needs.
Stage 2 – Identify Your Image Optimisation Issues
You can perform this step by going through your image inventory. You can examine your images in bulk, or if you have the time, go through them individually.
As you go through your images, decide which ones you still need. At the same time, consider which image file types are best for the images you have.
Since page loading speed is also important, consider resizing, cropping, compressing, and selecting an image format that loads quickly yet preserves image quality.
Stage 3 – Use Short Descriptive File Names
Make a habit out of using short descriptive file names for your images. Ideally, they should describe the image or its content. Why are short file names preferable? The name of your image forms part of your image’s URL. The longer the file name, the longer the URL.
Remove nonsensical file names and leave out special characters like underscores. As much as possible, use letters and hyphens only.
Final Words
Image optimisation audits aren’t a one-time exercise. You should do them periodically to ensure that your images are helping and not hurting your business and your brand’s credibility.
