Google and Your Readers Want Both Images and a Speedy-Loading Website – Here’s How
Do you know how to easily, quickly resize images so the file size (data amount) is not huge, still looks good, and doesn’t slow down your site? It’s really not that techie – I’ll tell you how and give you options for tools to do it.
Why Should You Care About Image Size?
Your website needs good-looking images. Readers and visitors are attracted to good graphics, and those graphics can help you get the point across in your copy and content.
But … we also need speedy-loading websites. And images can sloooooooowwww things down.
Google – and your readers – hate when web pages and blog posts are slooooow to load. Slow can mean ‘penalties’ or being lower in Google’s search results (especially in mobile search). Slow can mean more people bounce right off your pages or posts – tired of waiting even a few seconds. Slow can mean lower conversion rates for email opt-ins, sales, etc.
And slow can mean a few seconds or even half second more than what the tech gods have deemed ‘speedy.’ SEM Rush states your site needs to load in less than 2 seconds to be faster than 75% of the web. Neil Patel shared a Google report that shows how much those bounce rates go up for just a few seconds of loading time. Ouch.
(Google told us all back in 2018 it was going to ‘penalize’ sites for slow loading – it started doing so in 2021. Now, with two sites of comparable content, the one that loads faster will show higher in search results. So fix your site speed!)
A big reason a page or post will be slow to load = your images.
Not sure about your site-loading speed?
Use Google’s own Test My Site tool to test yours. Or use this page speed tool.
[Uhoh – I have some serious work to do according to Google’s mobile speed check ☹️]
There are other reasons your site can be slow and you should talk with website and WordPress experts on how to improve your site speed. I highly recommend you talk to my pal, Paul Taubman at Digital Maestro.
Yes, you can use tools or plugins to compress your images after they are on your site. The tools built in to ThriveSuite that I use will do this for me. Other pals like Smush by WPMU Dev. There are lots of plugin options for image compression.
But let’s focus right now on one less techie thing we can do before we add plugins to help with image compression AFTER those images on our sites.
Let’s resize our images before we ever upload them to our website.
An image that is 2MB or greater is too large in memory or data and taking up too much time to load. Shoot, some sources say even 500kb images are too big.
You don’t need a file size that huge to still have a good-looking image.
How-to resize images – what tools to use
One reputable tool to resize your images, for free – is from Adobe’s Creative Cloud Express here. (psst – Creative Cloud Express includes what used to be Adobe Spark – the competitor/alternative to Canva (affiliate))
Another free cloud tool is Compressjpeg. It has an elephant icon. You can bulk upload up to 20 images at a time.
I’ve also used and recommended TinyJPG as a cloud-based source to resize images.
We’re aiming for about a 60-75% reduction in size, with no discernible loss in quality.
I’ve also used the basic ancient Windows Paint program for years to resize an image. I can tell it what percentage to reduce by or set a pixel by pixel amount.
I just discovered that for Windows 10 or 11 you can add the PowerToys app (from Windows) and it has image resizer. I can right-click one or more images and resize. If you don’t immediately see the Resizer – click More Options.
Wow, potential total game changer! (I have a new Win11 computer and had already added this app – now I have a reason to dig in and use it! Ok, tested it and wow that was fast and easy! It took a 5MB photo down to 200kb easy and quick.)
As a long-time amateur photographer I have plenty of high-resolution images I took with my DSLR Canon camera. Plus even my iPhone XS photos can run large – not uncommon to have photos 2MB to 4MB (or even larger) in original. Some of the stock images I have purchased over the years also come in higher resolutions and larger file sizes.
I want to use those images in a blog post, on a sales page, or even make into social-friendly graphics. But they are just too big.
In addition to the web apps mentioned above, I’ve long used basic, Microsoft Paint to resize images and keep quality high enough for nearly all digital uses. It’s easy to resize even as large as 2000 px and the file size can be 900kb.
Or take a 2MB photo and resize it for a sales page to 900px square – and boom it’s 370kb. And still looks fine on the web page.
I love Canva for creating graphics for all kinds of purposes – but it’s not my first choice for resizing an image prior to editing, manipulating or putting it in a designed graphic. Canva (affiliate) does a good job or resizing those designed images for different uses (e.g. Facebook vs. Instagram vs. Pinterest). Also, you can use to download your Canva (affiliate) creations as a JPG file instead of the default of PNG to make file sizes smaller. JPG images are smaller in data file size while generally still good enough for most web uses.
But I recommend you resize any of your own or purchased stock images BEFORE you upload them to use in Canva.
Take just a little time before you design graphics for your web pages or blog posts to properly resize your images. It will save you time later and keep your website humming and loading in a speedier fashion.
