With today’s internet browsing speeds faster than ever, the need to ensure your website also loads just as fast and efficiently is a must. Not only is it important to resize and compress images for the browsing pleasure of your customers, but Google also requires your images to load as fast as possible if you are to stand any chance in ranking through Search Engine Optimisation.
In this blog, we provide you with some top tips to help you resize images before uploading them, along with some do’s and don’ts and other top tips to help you!
How to resize your images and photos
If you have taken your own photos on a camera or phone, chances are they will be too big in file size and dimensions. Depending on the use for your image, generally you wouldn’t need to resize your image any larger than 1280px wide, if you are using an image for a slideshow then you may want to go as large as 1920px.
If you are familiar with Photoshop you can resize images by loading your image(s) into Photoshop and change the size by going to Image -> Image Size, if you aren’t too sure how to use Photoshop, don’t worry, there is an online server called ResizeImage, to resize images using ResizeImage, first, start by going to https://resizeimage.net/ This website allows you to do all manner of things with your image(s), including resizing, cropping, rotating and more.
Have a play around with the settings and test with an image a few times so you can get to grips with how it all works – it’s easy to use and you will get the hang of it in no time!
Tip: Save your image(s) as a JPG (also known as JPEG) or a PNG file for images with a transparent background.
How to compress and optimise your images and photos
Once you have resized your image/photo and you are happy with how it looks, the next step is to compress the image file size before uploading it to your website.
To compress your image, go to a website called TinyPNG – https://tinypng.com/ and drag-and-drop the image(s) into the top section of the website as showing in the pic below; (unfortunately you are limited to 20 images at a time but it does do a great job with compressing images) and you will then see a progress bar appear to let you know your image is being compressed.
Once your image has finished compressing, you will see the Pandas arms go up and you can then download the compressed, optimised image for use on your website.
Remember to use good quality images
It’s really important to use the best images/ photos for your website to really sell your products and/or services, not postage stamp sized images that are blurry and pixelated.
To help you, we have listed some paid-for and free image resources below:
Free image resources
- Pixabay www.pixabay.com
- PicJumbo www.picjumbo.com
- Pexels www.pexels.com
- StockSnap www.stocksnap.io
- Gratisography www.gratisography.com
- Unsplash www.unsplash.com
- Morguefile www.morguefile.com
- FreeImages www.freeimages.com
Paid-for image resources
- iStockPhoto www.istockphoto.com
- ShutterStock www.shutterstock.com
- Dreamstime www.dreamstime.com
- Adobe Stock https://stock.adobe.com/uk/
Tip: If you can afford to, it is always best to pay a professional photographer to take your website photos for you, this is especially relevant if you have an e-commerce store.