In Google’s ever-changing algorithm, site speed is a crucial factor. The search giant measures page speed to determine quality of your website.
Page speed is a factor in SEO but it’s also important to user experience. Pages that take longer to load often have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times are a real turn-off for visitors and your conversions can suffer as a result.
Images account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page, so if you can optimise yours, you’ll enjoy big savings and performance improvements for your website.
So how do you get the quality without losing the speed? Welcome to the world of the image optimisation.
WordPress and image optimisation
WordPress doesn’t come with image-optimisation as standard and that means that content managers can forget to optimise images before uploading them to the Content Management System (CMS). The site can start to get heavy and page speed and load time will suffer.
How do we optimise images?
Optimising images takes time and effort. You need to be confident that the quality of your results isn’t compromised by getting the smallest possible file size.
A smart solution is to install a third-party plugin that can automatically optimise the images as you upload them to the CMS so you don’t have to worry about image optimisation at all.
The key is to optimise image size without negatively affecting the image quality and that’s where 3rd party services such as ShortPixel can be very helpful.
ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that reduces image sizes without reducing their quality. The plugin seamlessly integrates with the WordPress media library and upload process. That means there are no extra steps for you to take when uploading your images. You can even set it up to compress and optimise images you’ve uploaded in the past!
Final word
Image optimisation does take some time and effort but if you use a plugin such as ShortPixel, you will enjoy the benefits of lossless image optimisation and increase the performance of your website.
Learn more about how to optimise your website to increase performance and conversions with our UX and WordPress Code Review Service.
