Images are the essential part of any website. It’s the must-have tool to attract your visitors attention. It is an undeniable fact that 83% of human learning is visual. Moreover, according to the research, articles that contain images get 94% more views than articles without. These stats prove that images are vital for the website traffic, popularity and finally success.
Image Optimization Tips
You may think that it is not a big deal to add pictures to your content and benefit from it. But it is not so simple as it seems to be. The thing is that by uploading too much images to your site, chances are you will overload it. And if this doesn’t sound frightening to you yet, read the following statement. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
The only thing you can do to speed up your WordPress, Joomla or Drupal website is the image optimization. So, let’s find out how to do this in a proper way.
-
Use Appropriate Images
In case you don’t know this yet, you can’t use someone’s images for your site without permission. Luckily, there are lots of free and paid photo stocks all around the Internet. That means that you can easily find a picture that you can legally use for commercial purposes — or even one that has no copyright restrictions.
-
Select the Right File Format
JPEG, PNG and GIF are the most popular image formats nowadays. So, basically, your job is to pick one of them to upload to your site. But first let’s find out the major differences between them and why you should one over another.
- JPEG is considered to be the most popular and commonly used image format these days. The most significant advantage of this format is that JPEG is supported almost everywhere and that it keeps file sizes small. However comparing with GIF or PNG, JPEG format doesn’t support transparent backgrounds.
- PNG format comes with numerous advantages such as transparency support, better color range, automatic gamma correction, etc. PNG is a great alternative to GIF and JPEG formats, but considering the fact that it is the newest image format, PNG is not so widely supported yet.
- GIF is a bitmap image format which is used for simple animations. Its small size and transparency support makes it perfect choice for company logos, etc. It is also important to point out that GIF is extremely limited when it comes to color gamma as it supports only 256 colors.
Image Optimization before Uploading to Website
CMS platforms don’t come with a default function to compress images That is why it would be practical to optimize your images before uploading them to your site. This can be done in different ways.
Lots of graphical editing applications have an option which allow you to reduce the quality of an image. Photoshop is one of them and it comes with a possibility to save an image for web and devices. With Photoshop enables you to choose the file type and quality of the image.
There are also other useful online tools which can help you to compress images such as Pixlr and Fotoflexer. But one of the easiest ways to decrease the image size is to use online compression tool like TinyPNG or Compress JPEG. All you have to do is to upload your image. The web application will take care of everything for you.
Image Optimization after Uploading to Website
It is also possible to optimize your images after you upload them to your website. It should be mentioned that this can be done with the help of some plugins and extensions, depending on what CMS platform you use.
-
WordPress Plugins for Image Optimization
These are some WordPress plugins that you can use to optimize your images for your WordPress website and in this way you will speed up your site.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your site. It supports JPG, PNG and GIF file formats. Its major benefit is that the optimization process itself takes place within your own servers by default. And there is no need to connect to a third party service which means the optimization procedure can be held faster.
WP Smush allows you to compress JPEG, GIF and PNG images. You can set up this WP plugin so all of your new images are automatically compressed when uploaded to your website. WP Smush is available in both free and premium formats.
-
Optimize Images with Joomla Extensions
Joomla CMS is not a slow platform but if to overload it with images, this can change. So, in case you run your site on this platform, it still makes sense to optimize your images and make your Joomla site even faster. These are some extensions which can be helpful for you.
ImageRecycle is a Joomla extension which enables you to optimize and compress your images and PDF files, so that file sizes are reduced, page load time is improved and the quality is not compromised. With this Joomla extension you have option to optimize already existing images (for an existing website) or new images once they are uploaded. It comes with a free trial and then can be upgraded to its one of three pricing plans.
EIR – Easy Image Resizer is a free Joomla extension which utilizes Optimus for lossless image compression. This extension allows you to automatically resize the resolution of images which are uploaded through the media manager and 3rd party extensions. Joomla image compression just became easier.
-
Image Optimization with Drupal
Drupal CMS is considered to be one of the most complicated platforms to run a website on. Despite this fact, Drupal comes with a huge amount of advantages. One of its benefits is its speed but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to optimize your uploaded images.
The ImageAPI Optimize module allows you to preprocess and optimise uploaded JPG and PNG images that get generated via an Image Style rather than use Drupal’s inbuilt compression which only affects JPG files. All optimizations are lossless, but metadata is removed.
Final Thoughts
Now you are aware of how to optimize your images on these three most popular CMS platforms. But there is one thing that you don’t know yet. Website migrations are not easy tasks and when it’s done manually chances are that images lose their quality. Pay attention that with aisite, automated migration service, your images will be migrated not only flawlessly and accurately, their quality will be preserved. Moreover, while moving your site to WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, your migrated images will be properly optimized. Check it yourself by running a Free Demo Migration.
