Google and other search engines take many things into consideration when ranking your website and a big factor is the load time; they aim to give
the best experience possible when a user is searching for a site and if yours is slow to load they won't put you very high up on the list.
There are several things that play a part on the speed of your website; a few of these being the size of the code files, server speed and images. You have
to trust that your developer ensures that the code is made as small as possible and the server they put your site on has a low response time; but when
it comes to images there are a few tips you can follow to amend these and make them a smaller file size yourself.
- Resize the image before uploading it to your website. It's quite easy to just upload an image into your site as it is but if the image is a
lot bigger than the space it is going in to then it's important to resize it before inserting it into that space.
- Use the correct file extension. A picture image should be saved as a .jpg and an icon or image with solid colours should be a .png.
- Put the image through tinypng.com. This site will compress the image even further so that
it is at its smallest possible file size but keep the image quality at its highest.
Naming convention rules of images:
- all lower case letters
- no spaces
- use dashes in place of spaces
- Image names should be relevant to what is in the picture (for SEO and accessibility purposes)
Also, large images shouldn't be any bigger in file size than around 250kb where possible. But the lower the file size the better.
These measures are to ensure that images are optimised for search and to also keep the site speeds nice and quick!
These things should all be done before uploading an image to your website; this will help to keep your site performing at it's best and keep those all
important search engines happy!
If you'd like to find out how well your website is performing on search engines or the speed of your site then please get in touch and we'll be able to
help you out - 01243 888555 or use our contact form.