If you’re building a new WordPress website then you need to think carefully about the type of content that you’re including and the ways that it’s presented. For example, adding images to your WordPress website is a great way of boosting the user experience, but you need to make sure that they’re well optimized.
Poorly optimized images can result in slow website speeds, a poor SEO score, and a high visitor bounce rate. With this in mind, I decided to put together this list of the best ways to optimize images for your WordPress website.
- Make Sure Your Images Are Compressed
It’s extremely important to make sure that your images aren’t too large, otherwise they will take up too much server space and will take too long to load. I always recommend compressing your images before you upload them to your WordPress site, because this is simply the easiest option.
On the other hand, there are options if you want to compress images that are already on your website. The best thing to do here is to install an image compression plugin which you can use to optimize all of your picture files.
- Name Your Pictures Correctly
Unfortunately, a lot of people upload images to their website with generic names that don’t mean anything. You shouldn’t ever do this.
Basically, your image names play a large role in image SEO. It’s therefore very important to make sure that you name your pictures with descriptive titles that include relevant keywords.
- Use Alt Tags
Similarly, alt tags also present a great SEO opportunity. On the surface, alt tags are designed to provide information about an image for those who are visually impaired or who decide not to load images for some reason.
However, alt tags are also scraped by search engine bots and used for SEO. It’s therefore important to write high-quality, descriptive alt texts that are slightly different to your image titles.
- Integrate ‘Lazy Loading’
One great way to reduce the load time of pages or blog posts with a lot of image content is to use a technique known as lazy loading. This technique involves using a plugin that only loads images when people scroll down to view them. This means that only the top portion of each page is loaded initially, significantly reducing load times and improving the visitor experience.
- Make Sure You Include The Right Sized Images
When you insert pictures into your posts or page content, it’s important to make sure that you’re using the right size. If you only need a small image, then only insert a small image. Similarly, make sure that you’re using high enough resolutions for important or very detailed images.
Final Word
If you want to build the best WordPress website possible, you need to make sure that your images are optimized. There are numerous ways to do this, but the most important things are to compress your image files, add descriptive names and alt texts, and integrate lazy loading.
