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Visuals are vital to grabbing a visitor’s attention, breaking up long pieces of content, and increasing the likelihood of sharing it across social media platforms. Unfortunately, images also increase the size of your website, leading to slower loading times. It can annoy your visitors and negatively impact your search engine ranking.
Therefore, you should consider the importance of optimizing images in WordPress. Properly optimized images will reduce your website’s page loading times, bandwidth, and visitors’ browsing experience. If they are correctly optimized, they can have a significantly positive impact on your SEO.
Follow these five straightforward steps to optimize images in WordPress best – this will keep your users happy with faster page loading times and help with SEO:
File Format
The most commonly used file formats online are JPEG and PNG. JPEGS are better suited for photographs as they contain many colors. Screenshots and website design images, such as icons and buttons, are more suited to PNGs. Save your image to the most appropriate format before uploading it to your WordPress site.
Image Compression
Reducing the number of pixels in your images is essential for SEO and overall user experience. Large photos will slow your web page load, creating a poor user experience and negatively impacting your search engine ranking.
When adding images to your web pages, you need to choose the appropriate size for the page through graphic editing applications that compress the file size, such as Photoshop.
File Name
Before uploading an image to WordPress, consider the page it will appear on and the keyword you want this page to rank for. The image’s file name should include the keyword to tell the search engine what your image represents.
Alt Text
The Alt text of an image is often left blank. However, it is one of the most important fields for SEO. The description should include your keyword, helping search engines understand your image. The text should be concise and relevant because visitors will see it if they have turned off images in the web browser or are using a screen reader due to visibility impairments.
Automatic Image Optimization
Many plugins, such as WP Smush, can optimize WordPress images after you upload them to your website. which handles all image resizing, optimization, and compression needs.
By selecting the maximum image height and width, WP Smush will compress the file to reduce its size.
Alternatives to WP Smush include EWWW Image Optimizer, CW Image Optimizer, Imsanity, and Hammy.
If the quality of the images is of particular importance to you, such as photographers who want to showcase their work, check out Lazy Load. The plugin doesn’t sacrifice image quality because the images are only loaded when the area becomes visible to the user.
If you require help optimizing images in WordPress—or help with any other WordPress issues such as SEO, maintenance, or performance—get in touch with WP Tech Support. Our range of monthly payment plans will ensure that your WordPress website is fully optimized, backed up, and running to the best of its ability.
Customer service is at the heart of what we do. We make support and reporting easily accessible to our customers 24/7, 365 days a year! Contact us to learn how we can transform your WordPress website to keep search engines and visitors happy.