Images Sizes

Image size, dimensionally, say 500×500 or weight 500kb or 1MB, adds up over time. With thousands of products on a site, your image storage can quickly balloon out of control. 

Image bloat can adversely affect your overall site health by slowing it down and using up resources. When your site gets slow or has limited resources, this can lower your scoring with Google and create a bad shopping experience for your customers.

Uploading products can take time, and adding steps may not sound great, but the benefits are worth it in the long run.

It is best to understand the optimal size of an image for your site. Your customers generally shop on their phones, with 61% of shoppers completing their holiday purchases in 2021, compared to 30% in 2020. Even with a sizeable retinal display, there is no reason to have an image more than 1900, either wide or tall.

So slim down those 5000 x 5000 images before loading them to your site!

Images Weight

The next area to tackle is the weight of the image. There is no benefit to having a 7MB image anywhere on your site. Slim it down! You can do this when you are resizing your image and exporting it as web quality, and then go one step further and pass the image through a compression tool like https://tinypng.com/ .

https://tinypng.com/   compresses your images by more than half without losing quality. A yearly subscription is very reasonable, at $39 per user so you can compress all of your images with out a daily limit using the free version.

Put all images, product images, and homepage images through https://tinypng.com/  before uploading them to the site.

The goal is to reduce the size of the image to as small as possible, a 100kb image may look great on your screen and if it does, you are good to go!

We realize this will add a step or two to your product upload process, but the benefits are worth it over time as your server will not get filled up so fast.

If you need any help with this, let me know. We are here to assist!

Image Naming

Question: What is the best practice for naming images for SEO purposes?

We recommend using the name of the product or content, the brand, and the UPC or whatever publicly searchable identifier it might have. Some people add color or size as appropriate to fully communicate the item.

For example, if you have a ball for sale that comes in red and yellow. You might name the images:

bouncy-ball-wilson-red-09435875.jpg
bouncy-ball-wilson-yellow-87987243.jpg

These image names tell us:

Product name: bouncy ball
Brand: Wilson
Color: red or yellow
UPC/SKU/MPN: 09435875 or 87987243

We suggest avoiding:

Capital letters
Spaces: use a dash “-” or underscore “_” if you need to separate the information.
Periods: except for when using them at the end with the .jpg
Symbols: only use letters and numbers

Formatting of images:

.jpg: is suggested as these are generally smaller images
.png depends on what you want to do with the image and the page’s purpose. For example, transparent backgrounds only work with a png image.
.gif: should be avoided; they are only good to use in a specific size and don’t when made larger or smaller.

Image caching

To help with caching and your clients who hit the site regularly:        

• Always name your images newly for things like banners on the home page when you upload them. In other words you cannot call them “banner1.jpg” every time.

• If you are replacing an existing image anywhere in the site it has to have a new name.

Two tiny changes that will help a lot!