Nowadays, marketers have one goal in their mind – Optimize for Speed! The reason is obvious, mobile traffic has surpassed than that of desktop and Google has started to count the loading time of a website as one of the ranking factors. This means you can directly improve your site’s SEO by improving your website speed.

Owing to the fact that billions of websites run on WordPress, it makes sense to improve the load time of your WordPress site in order to improve ROI and raise conversions. I will share the top 5 image optimization tips for boosting the speed of your site.

1. Resize Images Depending on the Width and Container of the Website

People love to spend time on sites that display high-quality images. You can download high-quality images for your site using platforms like Burst that offers free images in high resolutions for web use. But, do not upload the images directly on your site. Of course, high-quality images are required but not at the cost of speed. Not all themes are same and images need to resized as per the width of the base container for saving space and improving efficiency.

You can resize images by moving to the WordPress Media Library. Simply click on Media -> Select your image -> Edit Image and pick new dimensions for your image:

(courtesy of ProteusThemes)

If you are looking for more help then I recommend you to check out these extremely useful image optimization tips based on page layout and structure.

2. Opt For Manual Image Optimization

Manually optimizing your images offers the best control. If you have time and you love to play with codes then you can opt for manual image optimization.

You need to use the below 2 image optimization applications for manually reducing the file size of images:

• JPEGmini is an excellent application that helps to optimize JPEGs files using an amazing optimization algorithm. You can expect to reduce your image file sizes by up to 30%.
• RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) is one of the most popular optimization tools for Windows. You can optimize JPEGs, PNGs, and GIFs with the help of this tool.

3. Use the Smush Image Compression and Optimization Plugin

Smush is by far the best image compression and optimization plugin for WordPress.

Here are some of the top features offered by this plugin:

• You can easily compress any image in your media uploads.
• Smush it compatible with other media library plugins like WP All Import, WP Retina 2X, WPML etc.
• You can compress images stored in other folders including NextGEN images, images stored on Amazon S3 using WP Offload S3.
• Smush removes hidden heavy information from your images and makes them light without losing the quality.

4. Use a CDN To Maximize Efficiency

Having a CDN will help you to load your images faster. People want to visit sites that load super fast and this ultimately improves the overall user experience leading to more sales.

A CDN works by reducing the distance between your visitors and the server by storing a cached version of your content in multiple geographical locations.

Google ranks websites higher that offer a better user experience. Installing a CDN not only helps to drastically improve the loading time of your website but also indirectly helps in improving the ranking of your website in the search results.

5. Opt For Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a great way to minimize the usage of a resource by holding the loading of images unless the visitors reach for it.

Under lazy loading, images at the top of the page are prioritized, while images below the fold are loaded when the visitor scrolls down the page. You can use plugins like BJ Lazy load to achieve this.

Conclusion

Image optimization is something that you shouldn’t ignore. Google and other search engines emphasize heavily on the proper usage of images on your website because it directly affects the user experience. Make use of the above-suggested strategies and boost the speed of your site.