As a creative, it’s essential to optimise your images on your website. Why? Faster page speeds mean google will put you towards the top of search results, for both image searches and general searches, plus it improves the experience for your customers.
Best Image Size for Web
It’s important to make sure your website loads quickly and Google is happy with your page speeds to rank highly. A large part of why websites don’t load quickly is image size.
I would recommend having no images larger than 150kb, but ideally around the 100kb size.
Adding Metadata to your images
Image Titles
Make sure the titles of your photo contain keywords for your website, for examples IMG_2367, isn’t going to be searchable, but Wedding-Cake-Designer-Surrey is going to do you a lot more favours.
Alt Text
Alt Text helps Google understand what your image is about, for example using something like “Rose and Peony Wedding Cake” will make your image more searchable.
Captions
These are mainly used to give more information to the image, for example, “Sugar flower rose and peony wedding cake by Great Cakiness, cake designer in Surrey.”
Adding Metadata in WordPress
You can usually add these directly to your CMS, such as WordPress.
- Head to the Media Library.
- Click Edit on any photo
- Add in the information in the required fields on the right-hand side.
My Top Tools for Resizing and Optimising Images for Web
If you’re lucky enough to have a subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom, they are incredibly powerful and make resizing, editing metadata and making your photos look amazing super easy.
Lightroom
Lightroom is my go-to tool for getting images ready for a website.
Not only can you set-up presets to edit all your images to look the same, but you can add metadata easily, crop and then export to the right size.
When you export, use the image size in kb function to make sure they’re no bigger than 150kb.
Photoshop
Photoshop works well; however, you have to set up a template and load your images into layers to export multiple ones at once. Also, you can’t be as accurate with the size but have to set the quality instead.
The Best Free Tools for Image Resizing for Web
Compresser.io – it’s super simple to use, and you can easily connect with Dropbox and Google Drive.
Kraken.io – with Kraken you can reduce multiple images in one go, rather than using the tool again and again. Plus it downloads them all in one handy .zip file. You can sign up for a free version.
Need more help? Contact me about how to optimise your website for Google.
