Images are an integral part of any website or blog. They not only make your content visually appealing but also help in enhancing the user experience. However, did you know that optimizing your images can also improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) results? Yes, that’s right – optimizing your images can make a significant impact on your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of image optimization for SEO and provide you with some tips and tricks on how to optimize your images to improve your website’s search engine visibility by using Smush image compression and optimization WordPress plugin.
Why You Should Optimize Your Images ?
Optimizing images can drastically reduce the load time of your website, resulting in an improved user experience. To get the most out of your website’s images, try turning on lazy load, resizing, and compressing them. Lazy loading can improve website performance by only loading images when they appear on the screen. Resizing images to the correct size for the intended use can also be beneficial. Compressing images can reduce their file size without negatively impacting quality. All of these steps can help with image optimization, and make your website load faster for the user.
Lazy Load
Lazy loading only loads images when they appear in the viewport of a user’s browser, which helps reduce bandwidth usage. This is an effective way to optimize images and improve the speed of your website. It’s important to ensure that you turn on lazy loading and resize and compress images to improve loading speed for your users. This is especially important for mobile devices, where downloading content can be more difficult and slower. Compressing images can reduce the size without compromising on quality. Try to keep images as small as possible, as this will make a huge difference in website loading speed.
Image Resizing
Resizing your images to the correct dimensions can help reduce the file size and make your website load faster. Additionally, there are other image optimization techniques that can be used to further improve website performance. For example, you can apply lazy loading so images are only loaded when they need to be shown. You can also compress images and use a CDN service to further reduce loading times. These techniques, combined with properly resizing images, can help to make your website faster and more engaging for your visitors.
Image compression
Compressing your images will also reduce the file size and speed up loading times for visitors. Optimizing images is a great way to improve the performance of your website, and there are multiple ways to go about it. By compressing image file sizes, you can reduce the amount of data needed to load a page, improving your website’s SEO rankings.
Image optimization is the key to making your website more efficient and user-friendly. Taking the time to compress images before they’re uploaded as well as turning on lazy loading and resizing can ensure that your website loads quickly and looks great. Image optimization may seem like a daunting task, but doing these three steps will result in a great website that many people can enjoy.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin
A great way to do this is to use a plugin like Smush which can optimize your images, turn on lazy load, resize, and compress the images to ensure your pages are loading quickly and efficiently. This can go a long way in improving your website’s SEO rankings, as faster loading times can often be a contributing factor.
Step-by Step Smush Installation and Image compression Process
Now, we can see how to install and set-up the Smush plugin to compress, optimize and lazy load images in WordPress.
Step 1: Login to your WordPress Dashboard
Step 2: Click Plugins and then give Add New
Step 3: Now Type “smush” in the search bar.
Sept 4: Click on “ smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize &Compress Images plugin an give Install Now
Step 5 : Once installed, then click Activate to enable the Smush plugin
Now you have installed the Smush plugin, now it’s a time to optimize and compress images on your WordPress site.
- After Login to your WordPress Dashboard, Click Smush link in your Dashboard menu as shown in below image.
- In a set-up wizard , click Dashboard to begin setup Smush.
- Now you can see Automatically optimize new uploads then click Next.
- If you want to Enable enhanced multi-pass lossy compression ? enable it and click Next
- Then enable Strip my image metadata and click Next.
- Finally Enable Lazy Loading then click Next.
If you want to modify any image, go to Dashboard and modify the settings.
It’s important to resize images to the exact dimensions you need in order to reduce file size and improve loading speed. Optimizing images by compressing them or turning on lazy loading can help page performance. Ensuring that images are properly optimized can make a huge difference for the overall performance of your website. It’s also important to consider the file type you choose for the image—JPEGs are often the preferred option because they offer a great balance between file size and quality.
Conclusion:
Implementing lazy loading for your images can help reduce page load time and conserve bandwidth. This is an important part of optimizing your images, as it reduces the number of requests sent to the server when loading a page. To get the most out of lazy loading, you should also consider resizing, compressing, and properly formatting the images you’re using. All of these steps together can drastically reduce the size of your image files, and help speed up page load times for your website visitors. You can easily achieve all these with the WordPress plugin Smush.
