Optimize Your Website's Image Sizes to Boost Performance

You may not always think about it, but optimizing your website's image sizes can dramatically boost your site's performance.

News

Welcome to the sixth edition of the eCom Buzz! At SwiftOtter, we're committed to keeping you informed about the latest trends and developments in the ecommerce world. These tidbits are meant to help you step your eCom game up and understand where the industry may be heading.

eBay Drops American Express

eBay has decided to stop accepting American Express starting August 17th. This might seem puzzling, but the rationale is clear when you consider the high fees associated with AmEx transactions. These fees can cut into profit margins significantly when you're talking about a business the size of eBay. While eBay has concluded that this change won't alienate too many customers, it's worth analyzing your own customer base and profit margins before making a similar, knee-jerk reaction decision.

Shopify Acquires Checkout Blocks

A chief complaint about Shopify has been that its checkout isn’t flexible. Enter Checkout Blocks. Almost every aspect of your checkout is now changeable. Change shipping methods, add custom fields, show banners and images, and more. The only downside is it requires a Shopify Plus instance.

Shopify saw such value in this app that it recently purchased Checkout Blocks, a tool that allows merchants on Shopify Plus to customize their checkout processes extensively. This acquisition is a strategic move to enhance flexibility and keep pace with competitors like BigCommerce, which already offer highly customizable checkouts.

Want to explore a platform comparison beyond just the checkout?

SwiftOtter has analyzed 65 points on four eCommerce platforms. See how this maps to your business requirements.

Zoom Meeting AI

In a rather futuristic twist, Zoom is working on AI that could potentially attend meetings on your behalf. While this might seem like a productivity booster, there are concerns about the implications of having an AI represent you in important discussions. Only time will tell if this innovation will be embraced or viewed skeptically.

Are poorly-sized images blowing up your website’s performance?

When it comes to website performance, image optimization plays a crucial role. High-quality images are essential for capturing your audience's attention and conveying your brand message, but if not optimized correctly, they can severely slow down your website. Here’s why optimizing your images is vital and how to do it effectively.

Impact on Website Speed

Large image files are one of the primary reasons websites load slowly. A slow-loading website frustrates users, increases bounce rates, and can negatively impact your search engine rankings. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool highlights that reducing image sizes can significantly improve page load times, which is essential for both user experience and SEO.

Understanding Image Sizes

Images come in various formats and sizes, and not all of them are optimized for web use. For instance, a hero image that is several megabytes in size can take an unnecessarily long time to load, especially on slower internet connections. This delay can drive potential customers away before they even get to see your products. Generally, images should be kept as small as possible without sacrificing quality. For most eCommerce sites, keeping images under 200 kilobytes is a good rule of thumb.

Hero Images: These are the large banners at the top of your page. They should be around 200-500 KB, but aim for the lower end of this range.
Thumbnails: These small images should be around 20-50 KB.
Product Images: These should be around 70-200 KB, ensuring they are detailed enough for customers to see product specifics but not too large to slow down your site.

It's also recommended to stay away from PNG files. If you need transparency in your image (like for your logo), then PNG is the way to go. But for most images on your website, we tend to recommend JPEGs as you'll see a reduced file size without a noticeable loss in quality.

Compression Tools

To tackle the problem of large image files, several image compression tools can help reduce file size while maintaining visual quality.

JPEGmini

This tool is great for reducing the size of JPEG images without compromising quality. It's straightforward to use and can significantly shrink your image files.

TinyIMG

Ideal for Shopify users, TinyIMG is a powerful tool that optimizes images for faster loading times. It supports bulk image compression, making it easy to manage large catalogs.

Cloudinary

Perfect for Adobe Commerce (Magento), Cloudinary offers advanced image optimization features, including dynamic resizing and format conversion. It automatically selects the best format and quality settings for each image based on the user's device and browser.

BigCommerce Image Optimizer

For BigCommerce users, the Image Optimizer plugin is a robust solution that compresses and optimizes images in real time.

To illustrate the impact of image sizes, let’s consider a common scenario. A webpage with a hero image of 2 MB might take several seconds to load on a standard internet connection. By compressing this image to 200 KB using a tool like JPEGmini, the load time can be reduced to under a second, significantly enhancing the user experience.

Optimizing your website’s images is a straightforward yet powerful way to enhance site speed, improve user experience, and boost your SEO efforts. By choosing the right formats, using effective compression tools, and employing responsive image techniques, you can ensure that your images contribute positively to your website’s performance.