How to manage a heavy image website?
Businesses are exploiting images for all means and purposes, resulting in image-heavy websites, because visuals have a significantly greater retention rate than verbal material. Despite being tailored for contextual consumption, these photos present difficulties.
According to Adobe, if photos don’t load or take too long to load, 39% of consumers will abandon a website.
They also pose a threat to website loading speed.
Images are heavier than text and take up more bandwidth, slowing page load time. There are, however, techniques to optimize the load time of your image-heavy website.
So, where do you begin? And how do you manage a website with a lot of images? We can’t just get rid of our photographs; they’re vital, if not essential, elements of our website. They help conversions by presenting visual details of our products and services, which increases engagement. However, there are ways to incorporate graphics into our websites without causing them to slow down. When building an image-heavy website, one of the major mistakes we do is not optimizing the photos. And, while we recognize the importance of doing so, we are unsure of how to go about doing so. We’ll look at how we can optimize our images to reduce bandwidth usage and enhance page load speed. Managing a website with a lot of images.
Use Rightly-Sized Images
Picture dimensions are one of the most common difficulties that affect image loading. The page grows heavier when a maximum-sized image is sent to a website with modifications to the browser’s CSS height and width. Furthermore, loading these take even more room.
Scaling images in a browser is a popular practice. While sending a large image saves time and effort, it wastes a resource that is far more valuable: bandwidth.
To fulfill the requirements, images must be downsized. When a smaller image is necessary, loading a large image takes time away from your website. Even correctly scaling thumbnails can help you save a lot of space on your page!
Create photos in all relevant sizes, including correctly sized website thumbnails, and deliver them to users based on their device resolution and requirements.
As seen in this example, a simple resizing can have a significant impact on the weight of the image to be loaded.
Use Responsive Images
When it comes to using the ideal sizes for photos on our websites, we need to talk about the appropriate image sizes for different viewports.
A vast number of people use a variety of devices to access our websites. Because each device has its own viewport, the images transmitted to it must be of varying sizes.
The majority of us make the mistake of providing images in the same size to all viewports while relying on client-side resizing, resulting in superfluous large images being rendered, wasting users’ bandwidth, and slowing page load times. We also pay a price in terms of wasted bandwidth as a result of this behavior.
We need to be able to recognize the different devices that people use to access our websites and resize our photos to fit the different viewports.
A responsive website is ineffective unless the images on it are also responsive.
Use Right Image Formats
The most prevalent picture formats are JPG, PNG, and GIF. Most people use any image format they like for their photos without considering the use case or the impact it will have on both the image and the website.
Each image format has its own set of specifications. Photographs should be served in JPG format, whereas logos and visuals with any transparency should be served in PNG format. Then there’s WebP, an image format that combines all of the advantages of its predecessors while also providing better compression ratios, although it hasn’t gained general popularity in browsers yet.
As we can see, choosing the right photo format can have a big impact on how much bandwidth your website uses. Even if selecting them is a challenging task, it is one that must be performed in order for your website to work at its best.
By using the correct image formats on our websites, we may not only save our consumers some valuable seconds, but we can also lower our bandwidth usage and hence expenses.
Compress Images
Compressing and optimizing the proportions of your images can help you reduce their size.
The two types of compression we can employ on our images are lossy and lossless compression.
Lossless compression is a set of techniques for compressing files without compromising their visual quality. Lossy compression, on the other hand, degrades image quality in order to produce a smaller image with no noticeable quality change. When compared to lossless compression, lossy compression definitely results in lesser file size.
The human eye is incapable of detecting certain types of discrepancies, therefore image compression makes use of this. You can reduce the size of an image by lowering its quality until any quality loss (if any) is undetectable to the naked eye.
Assume that the visual quality has been reduced to between 80 and 90 on a 100-point scale. An image can be shrunk to 20-25 percent of its original size with just that amount!
Be Mobile-Friendly
A growing number of people are using mobile devices to access the internet. Even search engines recognize the importance of responsive design, including it as a ranking element in SERPs. As a result, responsive web design is necessary.
What good is responsive design if our website’s graphics aren’t as well?
Image optimization for mobile devices should no longer be a last resort; it should be a top priority.
It’s a common misconception that responsive web design is all that’s required to make a mobile-friendly website. Your website’s photographs play an equally significant function in the process.
With more people browsing the internet on mobile devices, everything from bandwidth connections to different viewports now matters when it comes to image optimization for your website.
Why?
Your website will crawl if you don’t optimize them with these factors in mind.
Websites, serving the same image across all devices with browser-side resizing for responsiveness is a common occurrence. This, on the other hand, just adds to the website’s weight.
Images served to mobile devices do not need to be as large or as hefty as images served to desktop PCs. These items merely waste the user’s bandwidth and time. As a result, you end up paying for bandwidth that you don’t use.
It would be sufficient to have a compressed version that is optimized for the various viewports. These lighter, more responsive images will require less bandwidth, allowing them to load faster, shortening the time it takes for your website to load and saving you money.
Optimize Your Image Delivery
What good are all of your picture optimizations and transformations if they don’t get delivered quickly? Isn’t the ultimate goal of it all to have a faster page load time?
The vast majority of people make the grave mistake of providing all of their assets from their origin servers. When all website assets are provided from the same source, the server’s load is multiplied. It’s even worse if the server isn’t close enough to the user. When you combine both of these factors, you get a slow website.
A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is an international network of servers. And what it does for you is 3shorten the time it takes for requests to respond, resulting in speedier load times.
Deliver your photos using an image CDN with correct caching headers for even faster page loading. This allows users’ devices to cache images, saving bandwidth and time by serving the cached copies of those images every time the website is loaded, unless the content has changed.
Use HTTP/2
The size of web pages has changed as a result of the unrestricted use of visual elements throughout them. As a result, network protocols will need to be updated as well.
While HTTP/1.1 served us well, it isn’t up to the task of keeping up with current trends. The necessity for HTTP/2 is urgent.
HTTP/1.1 had a maximum of 6 simultaneous requests per domain, necessitating solutions such as domain sharding to improve performance. HTTP/2 allows many concurrent requests to be sent over the same TCP connection and includes capabilities such as server push and header compression using HPACK. This helps to drastically reduce latency.
Final Thoughts
Your photos, whether you like it or not, are slowing down your website. They also cost you money in terms of conversions.
Slow-loading websites cost retailers $2.6 billion in lost sales each year, and when 39% of consumers abandon a website because its graphics don’t load or take too long to load, you know where to start.
Mogi’s Proprietary Image Tech
Mogi’s Core Image Tech provides up to 80% lossless compression on images, making them extremely light for easy loading. It also auto-resizes images based on the screen size of the device to better optimize the image quality and the view . Finally, the smart crop also removes non-prominent areas from the images. Mogi’s Core Image Tech can be integrated seamlessly with your existing system. You can either choose your CDN or our CDN and we would work, either way, compressing and optimizing images on the fly. Clients have got up to 4x faster website load time, and 50% savings on bandwidth and CDN bills through lighter images.