Image Optimization and Performance Improvement in WordPress

Images can have a big impact on the performance of your website and the user experience that you offer. Without optimization, they can seriously slow down your website and even cause loading problems. More than half of mobile users will leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

Here are some of the main reasons why image optimization is important for your website:

1) Significant improvement in page speed

As mentioned above, images can slow down your website because of their size. This means that you must ensure that your site loads as quickly and smoothly as possible. This is even more relevant if you run an e-commerce website because your income is at stake.

By compressing your images and optimizing them for fast loading, you can speed up your website, and improve user experience.

2) Enhance user experience and improve accessibility

In addition to making your site run faster, optimized images are also more useful and relevant for your website visitors.

Optimized images usually have proper title and alt text, which is used by both search engines and screen readers in order to understand what your image is about. Correctly formatted and descriptive alt text on your images doesn’t appear on the page, but it is very important for visitors who have visual impairments and use screen readers.

3) Images contribute to synchronous loading of elements

Along with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, images increase loading time. Displaying your images gradually (via lazy loading) will stop your images from loading at the same time with all other elements, and that will make the page load quicker.

So, how to speed up your website?

1) Content Delivery Networks

A CDN will request your site content from the closest server location to your readers’ accessing point. This means that it stores a copy of your site in many data centers located in different places around the world. As soon as a visitor accesses your site through their home location, the nearest server will request your content, which will result in faster loading. Cloudflare and MaxCDN (now StackPath) are the most popular solutions for WordPress.

2) Caching

Caching is the act of temporarily storing data in a cache, so if a user frequently visits your site, the data will be automatically delivered without having to go through the initial loading process again (which happens when the site files are requested for the first time). A cache is a kind of memory that collects data that’s requested many times from the same viewport and is used to increase the speed of serving this data.

3) Optimize your images

Resizing, cropping, compressing – all these steps are important. The good thing is that you can adjust the image optimization on autopilot. A majority of WordPress plugins can help you with this. There are several solutions, but we suggest you play around with the most popular ones – ShortPixel, Optimole, Smush, Imagify or EWWW.

These are just a few reasons why image optimization is important for your website and should not be ignored. But, of course, if your site is not performing, image optimization alone won’t solve your problems.

Feel free to contact us if you want to improve your website speed and performance.

So, how to speed up your website?

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