How to optimize images for web

I will explain how to optimize images for the web because for some years, Google has given more importance to the speed of loading a website to place it in the first results. One of the contents that most influence the time it takes to open a website is the images, so it becomes increasingly necessary to optimize them. Almost all portals resort to a considerable amount of images to attract the attention of their visitors, and the tendency is to make them larger.

But the truth is that in the world of SEO it is worth having a careful hierarchy of titles, ALT tags, concise and descriptive lists or addresses, if the images weigh many megabytes, and make the loading time is prolonged.

And while we are in the era of broadband, for almost all mobile users the load is very slow. The percentage of users who get tired of waiting is high, and a heavy website is harder to position, because of the time it takes for Google to track it.

Reducing the weight of the image file is essential for the best performance of your website, although these modifications are often accompanied by the loss of image quality. You definitely need a reliable photo editor.

Choosing the appropriate tool to resize and compress the weight, and choose the appropriate image format, are unavoidable steps to optimize images without losing quality and get a better position for your website, so it is worth learning how to do it.

What is image optimization?

To optimize images is to contract the size of a file, by means of a script or a plugin, in order to accelerate the loading time of a page. Image optimization involves the implementation of a set of tasks, not only to ensure that the images of a portal have a manageable weight and size without compromising quality, but also to make the images indexable. Often, the terms resize and compress are used as synonyms to optimize. Although not entirely true, because compression and resizing are only part of the optimization process. In addition to accelerating the loading speed, compressing and resizing images is intended to rationalize the consumption of hosting resources, and free up space on the server.

Compression can be with or without loss:

Understanding with loss suppresses some data, degrading the image. This method requires observing the balance between file size and image quality, and can be done with any tool that allows you to configure its properties.

Lossless understanding compresses data without deleting it, which requires decompression of images before rendering.

Experimenting with different techniques will give you the right balance for each format.

How to optimize images for SEO

There are at least two ways to optimize images for SEO.

One is to use a tool that allows you to reduce the weight of the image and control the quality individually. The tool is needed especially when you deal with photo backgrounds.

The other, when installing a plugin on the web content management platform, to simultaneously compress all the images automatically.

Whichever medium is used, there are two aspects that must be taken into account: the format of the file and the kind of compression supported. The correct combination of these two can reduce the image size up to 5 times.

Ideally, the weight of the page should be between 1 and 2 MB. Some tools allow you to set a limit and even remove background online when it’s no longer needed, so that all pages uploaded to the website have a size that does not affect the loading speed.