mages are one of the basic things on all websites, and configuring and improving the site’s images is essential in order to increase its speed, maintain visitors and customers, and improve their experience, because unoptimized images make the site slow, which can lead to the loss of visitors and make it difficult to achieve the goal of creating the website. .
That is why we have prepared this article in which we will introduce you to the importance of improving your site’s images and the extent to which this affects its speed. We will also give you some tips that you can benefit from in preparing images in order to improve the speed of your site.
Why should you create images on your site?
Creating and optimizing images is one of the important things that you must take into consideration when you want to increase the speed of your site, as websites include a large number of images, just as if your site were an online store, as you will have to add images of the products that will be sold in your store. As we know, the size of images is larger than the size of other page data, such as texts and others, so they take the most time when loading website pages if they are not formatted correctly.
When you improve your site’s images, its speed will increase significantly, which improves visitors’ experience and makes them want to stay on your site for a longer time, and this is considered one of the reasons that most contribute to increasing their chances of becoming customers, and their chances of purchasing your products. Below we will summarize for you the benefits that image optimization adds to your site through this list:
- Optimizing the use of hosting resources: Images take up a large space of hosting resources and require a large bandwidth to transfer them to users’ browsers, so optimizing them will provide you with more hosting resources to use for other matters, especially if your hosting resources are limited.
- Increase site speed: Optimizing images before publishing them will reduce their size, which increases the speed of your site and the speed of loading its pages.
- Make the user experience better: By improving your site’s images, users will feel very smooth when navigating between your site’s pages, ensuring that they stay on your site for a longer period.
- Optimizing the site for search engines ( SEO ): As we mentioned previously, preparing images helps improve the speed of your site, and this leads to improving it for search engines.
Tips for creating and improving website images
There are many things you can do to improve your WordPress site images, and below we will give you some tips that you can use to do this:
1- Compress website images
Image compression is a process in which the size of images is reduced without affecting their accuracy or the way they are displayed on the site. Therefore, image compression is considered one of the most important means that you can benefit from in order to improve the images of your site and increase its speed.
You can compress images in many ways, and most image editors often provide this feature. You can also rely on one of the web tools TinyPNG or JPEGmini to do this. In addition, WordPress provides you with a number of plugins that compress and enhance images automatically, whether when uploading them to The site or those that were previously downloaded before installing the add-on, and these add-ons include Smush and TinyPNG .
2- Choose the appropriate format for images
Choosing the correct image format is one of the important things that plays a role in improving site images. Not all image formats are suitable for websites. There are formats that help improve page speed, but in return they are not supported by all web browsers, such as JPEG XR formats.
There are many convenient and globally famous formats that you can use in your website, and these formats are:
- WebP : Google developed this format to include all the features of other formats. By relying on images in this format, you will be able to greatly compress and improve images without reducing their accuracy. Fortunately, WordPress supports this format and provides you with add-ons that improve and convert all images on your site to this format. Such as Optimole and ShortPixel .
- JPEG: The JPEG or JPG format is considered one of the most popular image formats used on websites, because it is supported by almost all devices and operating systems, and you can optimize and compress images of this format while maintaining a balance between image quality and size.
- PNG: This format supports a large number of colors in the image, and also supports partially transparent images. It is a suitable choice for images that contain text. The images of this format are characterized by being high-resolution images but of high sizes, which reduces the page loading speed. You can rely on this format for images that require high resolution, such as logo images, text images, etc.
3- Use the lazy loading feature
The loading speed of your WordPress website pages will increase when you activate the lazy loading feature , as this feature delays loading the image on the website pages as long as these images are outside the frame of the screen displayed to the user.
You can activate this feature in WordPress by installing one of the plugins designated for this on your site, such as the Wp Rocket and Optimole plugin , where you install the plugin and activate the lazy loading feature from its settings. Although WordPress now supports the lazy loading feature by default, it does it in a way that does not… All browsers support it, so it is best to activate it through a dedicated add-on.
4- Use appropriate image dimensions
Using the appropriate dimensions for images according to the context in which they will be published is considered an effective practice for preparing images in order to improve the speed of your site. For example, instead of using a prominent image for the article with dimensions (3200/4000), know the actual size in which the prominent image will appear on your site and use these dimensions. Size for featured images.
It is possible to modify the dimensions of images in many ways. You can modify them on your personal computer using one of the image editors before uploading them to the site. WordPress also provides you with the ability to modify the dimensions of images after uploading them to the media library using tools provided by the library, but it is better to do this before adding the image. To the library, because modifying the image in the media library leaves multiple copies of it, and this causes an increase in the amount of memory consumed by the hosting resources.
5- Enable the browser caching feature
When you activate the caching feature on your site, your site images are saved on visitors’ devices, and when the user accesses your site again, the images are imported from his device instead of importing them from the web server, and this increases the speed of displaying images on your site significantly, and thus its speed increases because The rest of the page data is loaded more quickly, as the bandwidth in which the images were to be downloaded is used to load the other page data.
In order to activate this feature, you can install one of the caching add-ons , such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache . You install and activate the add-on, and then activate the feature through the add-on settings.
6- Relying on a CDN content delivery network
As we know, the data of any website is saved on a server within a data center in a certain region of the world, and when a user enters the site, this data is imported from the server, and the greater the geographical distance between the data center and the user’s location, the longer the time for the data and images to arrive. browser, and the loading time of website pages increased.
This problem can be avoided by relying on a content delivery network such as Cloudflare , as it consists of a large number of devices spread in different regions of the world. When you rely on a content delivery network, a copy of your site’s content, including site images, is saved on each device. Network devices: When a user enters your site, site images and data are called from the CDN device closest to the user’s site. This is why relying on a CDN is one of the suggested ways to improve the speed of your site.
In conclusion, we would like to point out that site speed is related to many things that you must pay attention to and improve in order to increase its speed, but as we explained in this article, improving images is considered one of the most important things that contribute to this, so be sure to prepare and improve your site’s images in order to develop it. .
