Image sizing and resolution - How does the image size, dimensions, and resolution affect user behavior?
Not many understand the role of images in web content— how images influence user behavior. They think images are used to boost the attractiveness of a website. They fail to realize, images play a much bigger role than that.
There is an information overload on users these days. In such a scenario, they can’t help but be choosy in deciding what content to consume. Hence, they prefer to view images for a better understanding of things over reading their descriptions. This explains why product images play such a vital role in selecting and purchasing products from eCommerce sites. Some experts even go to the extent of saying that images are more useful for consumers than product-specific information, long descriptions, and even ratings or reviews.
Talking about online publications, images are critical for anything starting from better user engagement to the number of page views you get, not to mention conversion.
However, incorporating images into a website is not as simple as it sounds. You can’t pick any random image and publish it on your website. Its various attributes such as size, dimensions, and resolution need to be taken into account. After all, it’s these attributes that determine how user-friendly an image will be once it is published. This necessitates that we understand how image size, dimensions, and resolution individually impact user behavior.
Image size, resolution, and pixel dimension - Their interconnectedness and impact
Image dimensions, resolution, and image size are the most crucial attributes of digital images.
Hence, it is crucial to have a good understanding of the relationship between pixels (image dimensions), resolution and image size in order to get desired results at the time of resizing images for the internet.
We will start with pixels, which are the fundamental units of all digital images.
What are pixels?
Pixels are an abbreviation for “picture elements”, which are small blocks of data that comprise digital images. A digital image is created from individual pixels, much like a painting that results from individual strokes of the brush.
The pixels in an image are often too small to notice when viewed without zooming in to or out of the image. You don’t really see the pixels; you just see a continuous picture with colors, light, and shadows at play which looks no different from what you see in the world around you. So, what your eyes see on the screen is actually an illusion. To see the real composition of an image, you will have to look closer. You will have to zoom in to see the pixels in the image separately. It is then that you will realize, what appears as a continuous image actually consists of a lot of squares that are extremely small in size. These squares are nothing but pixels.
Zooming in further will reveal that every pixel has a single color and the whole image is composed of solid-colored squares arranged in a grid pattern. Your eyes combine the colors to create a picture that is rich in detail when viewed from a distance.
In essence, pixels are what create the digital world!
The size of an image file— How does it impact user behavior?
Images that are large and heavy take up more space on a web server. Additionally, extracting images from a server to be displayed on a browser requires more bandwidth. Although images can be extracted from servers having plenty of disk space and bandwidth capabilities, hiring such a server will increase the cost of hosting.
Hence, website owners can optimize images to reduce the disk space and bandwidth required to display them. Optimized images also improve the speed at which web pages load pictures, even on slower internet connections such as mobile devices.
Visitors using a website will be more satisfied if it loads quickly and works well— websites that load faster are more popular with users. They are also easier to navigate.
You can improve your user experience by following best practices, such as structuring your website correctly and optimizing images so that they load faster and look better. Note that a positive user experience is crucial for any online business to survive and thrive.
Resizing images does not mean shrinking the image with CSS and HTML. It refers to actually resize the image when the browser serves it on devices.
For instance, if you want a product display image of 300×300 pixels, and you have an image of 3800×5000 pixels for this purpose, what will you do? You will resize it. But instead of setting the image’s width and height in HTML code, you can resize it prior to sending it to the browser. This not only reduces your webpage’s load time but also decreases its disk space and bandwidth on the server where it is hosted.
Many developers also overlook the importance of resizing images related to the website’s layout. Images that were sized for an older design will likely not be appropriate for a new design. If you had a banner image that was 1600×1700 pixels but your new website design has the only 800x1000px, you can reduce the size of the image by scaling it to fit the new dimensions.
Be aware of the aspect ratio when you use a tool to reduce an image’s size. Now, what does an aspect ratio mean? It is the ratio of the width of an image to its height. It is usually expressed as a number such as 4:5. Your image’s aspect ratio will not be affected if you keep it at the same level. If you increase or reduce the height, but not the width, the image will be distorted.
If possible, keep your image file size from exceeding 500kb, though the cap is much higher than this value. To achieve this, you can reduce the image’s size before saving and uploading it. Lower file sizes keep websites light, which helps them load faster on users’ devices. This causes user engagement to simply skyrocket.
Pixel dimensions and user behavior
Pixel dimensions are the height and width of pixels of an image.
An image has a certain number of pixels, from top to bottom and left to right. This measurement is referred to as pixel dimension.
By simply multiplying the width and height of an image you get the number of pixels in it. For instance, if the width of the image is 4509 pixels and its height is 3000 pixels then it contains a total of 13,527,000 pixels.
It is a common misconception that images with a higher number of pixels guarantee high-quality web pages. People often use images from 2000 to 5000 pixels, even though the most common format for large screens is 1926 pixels in width. Remember, the number of pixels in an image doesn’t determine its display quality, it only increases or decreases the file size. It’s the resolution of an image that determines its quality in terms of clarity. An image with a higher number of pixels will only add to the weight of a site, which will increase the site’s load time and affect the user experience negatively.
Image resolution and its impact on users' behavior
We already know that pixels are small colored squares that compose digital images; image dimension, on the other hand, refers to how many pixels an image contains from top to bottom and left to right. Now, what does image resolution imply? Image resolution determines how big or small a photo will appear on the display, and also, determines its overall quality.
One common misconception about image resolution is that it affects the file size. Many people believe that image resolution is a factor responsible for file size. This is not true. The file size does not change when the resolution is changed. It’s only the size of the image on a display that can be changed by changing the resolution.
Bear in mind that the resolution value of an image doesn’t affect the number of pixels in it. Say, you have an image of 4509 pixels x 3000 pixels in 300 pixels/inch resolution. If you lower its resolution to 150 pixels/inch from 300 pixels/inch, you will see that the pixel dimensions of the image remain the same at 4509 pixels x 3000 pixels. However, its width and height will increase on display.
This happens because by reducing the resolution value, you are not really reducing the total number of pixels in the image, you are only squeezing half as many pixels as before in every square inch of the display. This immediately causes the height and width of the image on the display to increase.
So, it is possible to increase the print size of an image by reducing the resolution and vice versa using an image resizing and resampling tool.
Since the resolution determines the quality of an image, it directly impacts user behavior.
While images with poor resolution drive users away, high-resolution images are one of the biggest reasons why users stick around. Resolution is especially important for e-commerce and travel sites.
Final words
According to HTTP Archive, 64% of a website’s weight is made up of images. In such a scenario, you will only put your site at risk by not resizing and resampling your images before uploading them on your site. Don’t worry, it is possible to reduce the size of images, without compromising on the quality. By doing so, you will not just boost page load speed but also improve the user experience of visitors on your website.
Remember, sites that load quickly are loved by users. Hence, websites that load in excess of 3 seconds have higher bounce rates. This problem can only be solved by image optimization. Optimizing web images is the act of creating or delivering them in formats, sizes, and resolutions that maximize user engagement.
Mogi’s Proprietary Video/Image Tech
Mogi I/O (www.mogiio.com) is an AI-enabled Video & Image Delivery SaaS that helps Content Platforms to Improve Customer Engagement by enabling Buffer free Streaming Experience for the user through a patented multi-CDN upstream architecture called Mogi Streaming Engine, Enhanced experience through quality enhancement and compression of up to 50% both during transcoding itself and Deeper user insights through Advanced Video Analytics.
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.
Contact us now to make your website load faster, rank Higher on SEO, and reduce bounce rates – susheel.srinivas@mogiio.com