More Images Might Feel Appealing, But They Affect Site Speed!

Images have become an essential part of the web.

Whether you visit a blog, eCommerce site, or social media platform, you will see tons of images. Images are necessary elements that make websites engaging.

Otherwise, those sites or pages will look dull. Moreover, visual information is as necessary as textual information. Hence, images are uploaded to ensure a balanced appearance of web pages.

The presence of images not only makes a site look more appealing but adds to the UX (User Experience) offered by the website. However, several images can also become a problem for your website.

The presence of several images on a webpage can affect its loading speed considerably. There could be other reasons behind a slow page loading speed, but it is generally because of images.

We don’t advise you to lessen the number of images on your page, as doing so will affect the aesthetic appeal of your website. There are a few tips that you need to follow to tackle the issue of slower page loading speed because of images. We have discussed these tips in detail below to help you ensure a swift loading speed of your web pages.

Read on to know more.

1. Compress High-Resolution Images

Images come in high-resolution these days. This high resolution is made possible at the cost of a larger file size of images. However, it is essential to understand that a larger file size of images posted on a webpage means more time to load those images, which eventually translates to a slower page loading speed. Hence, it is essential to reduce the file size of images before uploading those images to the website.

Image compression is the most effective way to reduce the file size of images. In this process, you minimize the size of a graphic file without affecting its quality below a certain level.

The image compression is done in terms of bytes of the size of files. An efficient image compressor can compress the file size up to several hundred bytes and make it suitable for upload to the website. If you want to upload multiple image files in one go, an online photo compressor with a batch compression feature can be helpful.

In addition to compression through an efficient online image compressor to reduce the size of image files, you can also use advanced CMS plugins for this purpose.

These plugins are available for websites built using CMSs (Content Management Systems), such as WordPress and Shopify. These plugins optimize the uploaded images on your website by reducing their file size through the compression technique.

2. Keep the Intrinsic Size of Images Equal to Display Size

The images uploaded to websites are generally not resized to fit their display size, affecting the website’s speed.

The term used to refer to the display size of an image on the website is known as render size, while the original size of images is referred to as the intrinsic size. If the intrinsic size of images is larger than their render size, you will encounter a performance issue from the website.

The browser downloads the intrinsic size of an image first, and then the HTML code running in the background converts it into its render size before displaying it on the website. This entire process takes significant time.

Hence, if you don’t want to affect the speed of your website, it is necessary to crop the images before uploading them to ensure an equal intrinsic size to the render size of the images. Moreover, doing this will require less effort from the browser as well.

3. Choose the Right Format

While compressing and resizing images is necessary to ensure faster speed of the website, it is also essential to choose the right format of images.

Generally, you will find three format types being used for this purpose. These formats are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Every format comes with its pros and cons. For example, JPEG features more colors and allows considerable compression. PNGs can be used as an alternative to JPEGs, but there are two types of PNGs.

PNG-24 images come significantly larger. However, PNG-8 comes in smaller file sizes. The drawback with PNGs is they don’t support much compression.

GIFs support animations and can be a great way to post engaging content on your website. However, you can’t compress GIFs to reduce their size. Hence, it is necessary to use the right format of image files to enhance the performance and speed of your website.

End Note!

Images are an essential part of websites nowadays and play a key role in enhancing their aesthetic appeal. However, you need to consider a few factors before uploading images to the website to ensure your website’s optimum UX and performance.

We have discussed these factors above in detail to help you. Hopefully, this discussion will be helpful for you in making your website faster.

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