Image compression is the key to more innovative websites. But not many people understand it.
Sometimes, companies think of page speed optimization as an unnecessary task that will eventually waste their time. This blog attempts to help you understand why image optimization is necessary and how it affects your website speed.
To starts off let’s see what happens when you ignore website performance and image sizes.
How does overall website speed affect conversion rates?
Website performance has a considerable and measurable effect on conversion rates. Most of which is based on the size of images used. Studies, articles and blogs have consistently shown that fast page speed will result in a better conversion rate.
In simpler words, the quicker a webpage loads, the more likely a user is to perform the targeted action on that webpage.
Leading to the question: Why role does Image optimization play?
When we check websites for slow page speed, too big image files become the primary offenders, along with unused JavaScript and CSS files or font files.
Image compression helps in improving page load speed, boosts websites’ SEO ranking, and improves user experience. Page load speed is the amount of time taken by a web page to load completely.
According to inc.com, half of the visitors will leave your website if you have non-optimized images. Since these heavy images are known to eat up the site’s storage space and lower its loading speed – in fact, roughly 39% of visitors will likely leave a website due to a slow image loading time. Image optimization is key to improving your website’s overall performance and providing a better experience for site visitors.
Actually, it is like that for many people because page speed optimization contains many confusing terms. For them anything that’s too confusing is for the “nerd types”. And when we explain them in really long and fancy presentations, it may get even more confusing since decision-makers of websites have fixed time to read and understand them due to their heavy daily work schedules.
When we can’t summarize the importance of these tasks, they keep postponing any page speed-related tasks. This is a normal process because a website needs many improvements to provide better products and services, and the software teams may have a really full schedule.
However, postponing these kinds of tasks will not solve the problem and may result in organic visibility, traffic loss, and higher bounce rates. According to Google, the bounce rate increases to 123% depending on the page load time. Users visiting the website will become impatient as loading between web pages takes time.
Traffic loss and higher bounce rates signal to Google that users aren’t happy with your page and will eventually affect your rankings, too. Page speed will make you lose visitors and eventually customers. It would help if you also kept in mind that more users now access websites from mobile devices than from computers in today’s world. This means better image quality is not a priority but a smoother website. That means when you design a website, your new site should be planned, prepared, and designed to shine on smartphones. “Don’t worry so much about the site’s desktop version,” says Spring. “Design backward. Think about the mobile users and what they can see.” That starts with optimizing your heavy images in a way that they run efficiently on your mobile phones, laptops, and any other device that may be accessing them. That’s why compressing, resizing and optimizing your images is an important task to think about, even before uploading them to your website because it yields better results and better performance.
Real-Time Effect of Image Compression on Page Speed
Since we’ve discussed the significance of image compression and the tools that can help you, we can go into the details of how you can improve your page speed for better results.
For image compression, there are different methods you can follow:
Enable Compression
Decreasing the sizes of CSS, HTML, or JavaScript files to larger than 150 bytes can help improve page speed. Image Compression will decrease the overall weight caused by massive data. Moreover, heavier images should also be compressed to improve the speed, and the presentation of the website will be retained
Optimize Images
Use an image optimization tool to make the experience better. Hence making online photo compressors a need for any website. Be prepared to take a hard look at your budget when you are looking for ways to compress because some may cost you more than others. But, there’s no denying that no matter your budget, your website needs to have compressed images. Choosing the best image compressor online will help you optimize your images without affecting their original quality. And, in today’s world, you are lucky because there any many online tools available to make your website smoother and better, and many websites will help you sort through multiple options if you have complex needs.
Once, you know how essential speed is for your website and why it determines a website’s traffic, you’ll yield better results in the form of conversion and sales.