In Google’s ever-changing algorithm, site speed is a crucial factor. The search giant measures page speed to determine the quality of your website. Page speed is a factor in SEO, but it’s also relevant to user experience. Pages that take longer to load often have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times are a real turn-off for visitors, and your conversions can suffer as a result.
Images account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page, so if you can optimise yours, you’ll enjoy significant savings and performance improvements for your website. So how do you get the quality without losing the speed? Welcome to the world of image optimisation.
WordPress & Image Optimisation
WordPress doesn’t come with image-optimisation as standard, and that means that content managers can forget to optimise images before uploading them to the Content Management System (CMS). As a result, the site can get heavy, and page speed and load time will suffer.
How Do We optimise Images?
Optimising images takes time and effort. It would be best if you were confident that the quality of your results isn’t compromised by getting the smallest possible file size. A smart solution is to install a third-party plugin that can automatically optimise the images as you upload them to the CMS, so you don’t have to worry about image optimisation at all.
The key is to optimise image size without negatively affecting the image quality, and that’s where 3rd party services such as ShortPixel can be beneficial.
ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that reduces image sizes without lowering its quality. The plugin seamlessly integrates with the WordPress media library and upload process. That means there are no extra steps for you to take when uploading your images. You can even set it up to compress and optimise images you’ve uploaded in the past!
The team at HITS are currently developing their image optimisation system, which will natively integrate directly into our servers. This means every website we run will have its images optimised automatically. We hope to release this to market after the completion of our beta test trials.
Final Word
Image optimisation does take some time and effort. Still, if you use a plugin such as ShortPixel, you will enjoy the benefits of lossless image optimisation and increase the performance of your website. You can also test out your website loading speed with this free tool provided by Google PageSpeed Insights.
Whether you’re an existing client or considering HITS as your web agency, call us now if you’d like to find out more.
