Image Optimization Tips for Your Ecommerce Websites

Product images are the most crucial elements of most eCommerce websites. Most data stored on eCommerce websites consists of images.

Sometimes these images slow down the servers and affect the loading speed of the websites. Moreover, ranking websites with the less textual content is a bit difficult. In addition, sometimes, the images affect the user experience, especially when their dimensions are inappropriate. Keeping all these things in mind, most eCommerce store owners prefer optimizing every photo before uploading them on their websites.

If you are an eCommerce store owner and want your website to drive sales and perform better on search engines, you should optimize every image according to to set standards. Otherwise, your website won’t be able to impress visitors.

However, this article is for you if you don’t know how to optimize images. It will enlighten you with some helpful tips that can perfectly optimize every picture and let you generate a lot of leads.

Let’s jump into the tips!

Select the Most Suitable Format

The image file format is the first thing you should consider while optimizing images. Numerous file formats are available on the internet, but only some are suitable for every device. Some formats don’t open pictures on even the latest devices. Therefore, you should wisely select the formats.

It is better if you go with PNG, JPG, or Gif for website images because these formats are supported by almost every internet device. However, you should analyze your needs and servers when selecting one among them.

If you want to show the images in the best quality and your servers can bear a burden, you should select PNG. PNG is the best for high-res photos. However, the only issue with this format is that PNG files are a bit heavier compared to JPG.

JPG is a suitable option if your servers are not reliable or you have already uploaded hundreds of pictures on your site. JPG also supports high-res images and keeps the size to a minimum. On the contrary, Gif is suitable for decorative images or thumbnails.

Compress Images

After selecting the format, now is the time to check the image size. If the image size isn’t below 4MB, you should compress image size online using any of the image compressors you think is reliable. Remember that you should only compress image sizes to an optimum size so their quality or resolution isn’t affected.

Don’t know why image compression is essential? Here is the answer. The heavy size images put an extra burden on the servers and slow down the websites with time. Also, the heavier images are posted on your eCommerce store, the more time it will take to load.

Include Pictures to Sitemaps

Creating image sitemaps is also mandatory if you want the images to perform well over search engines. When you create a specific image sitemap and add all the photos to those sitemaps, you inform search engines that those pictures exist on your web pages.

When the images are added to the sitemaps, the search engine crawlers consider them as data and show the web pages to users in case of a matching query. The image sitemaps also enhance the SEO score, which is among the primary goals of eCommerce websites. So, if you are not getting a lot of visitors regularly, make sure to add all the products or other images to the sitemap.

Mention the Dimensions

Another crucial thing you should consider is the image dimensions. Usually, some website owners don’t indicate the image sizes in the codes. So, when they upload the images, they overlap the other types of content or pictures. If you don’t mention the dimensions or don’t resize images according to website designs, you ruin the user experience. At worst, not to mention the image sizes can cost you a lot of leads.

Optimize Thumbnails

eCommerce websites should always upload thumbnails on the category pages. These thumbnails showcase the products in the best way to arouse everyone’s interest and encourage them to click on the category page.

These thumbnails don’t take up a lot of space, yet they show images in the best possible quality and manner.

However, it could help if you ensure the image sizes need to be bigger, which can disturb the loading speed. Otherwise, these thumbnails will badly affect the websites instead of providing benefits.

Rely on Responsive Pictures

While designing a website or mentioning the dimensions, don’t ever forget mobile users. Most people use mobile phones to browse the internet or shop online in this modern world. If your product images aren’t responsive to mobile users, you will lose a vast audience.

You don’t need to complete several challenging tasks to create a responsive image. All you need is to learn what are responsive images and how to create them. It included srcset. Srcset defines the width of the image file and sizes guide browsers about the wideness of the images on the screens. You can quickly make your images responsive by perfectly creating a balance between srcset and sizes.