If your website takes a lot of time to load, you must know that one of the common reasons behind this can be large images. Visual content on the website, especially images, is quite heavy and can easily increase the loading time of your site. Now here, an important thing you need to know is that more than 50% of traffic on your website comes from images, so you cannot remove or avoid using them.
In this post, we will tell you how to resolve the issue of images slowing down your site. Before that, let us go through how images can slow down your site!
Why are images slowing down your website’s speed?
Here are some of why your images are ruining your site’s experience by increasing the load time.
Your images are large
One of the most common reasons behind the slow speed of your website is that you are using large-sized images. Using large-sized images is not a good approach for search engine optimization as they take a lot of time to load. Large-size images take more bandwidth to slow down the loading time for visitors. Now you must know that lowering the size of the image can ruin its quality, so we suggest you use effective and reliable ways to combat the size issue. The image size might be an issue, but you must never compromise on the visibility or quality of the image on a website.
Your images are not published in unspecified dimensions
When you add images to a website, you need to make sure that you follow the search engine’s guidelines for making the image scalable; Google has specified the image dimensions that you need to follow. So you need to make sure that you publish your images according to those specific guidelines. When you scale images appropriately, you can easily avoid the loading time problem because of images. If you add images on your website without scaling, then the browser has to do this scaling on your behalf, which would take more data and time to load.
Images are not optimized for different devices
Another reason images can increase the load time is that it is not optimized according to different devices. Suppose you are not optimizing your images for mobile devices or other portable visuals. In that case, you will see an increase in load time. If the images are larger than the user’s screen display, it will slow down the page; hence, it would take more time to load.
You have used images in heavy formats
Another common reason images might be slowing down the site is that you have published them in heavier formats. Images exist in different file formats, and it is up to you to use the best one for your site’s images. Using image formats like TIFF or BMP can increase the size of the images and add to the loading time. Also, know that these image formats cannot be compressed, so you need to make the right choice. Usually, the best formats for websites are JPG and PNG. You can use PNG if you are looking for more quality, whereas you can use JPG if you are looking for smaller size options.
How to fix the problem of images slowing down your site?
Here are some of the best options that can help you solve the problem of load time because of images:
Compress Image Size
If you want to speed up your website, which is loading slowly because of images, you can use an online image compressor for help. Photo compressor uses AI and advanced algorithms to compress image size without damaging their quality. There are two types of compression methods offered by image compressors that are lossy and lossless. In lossy compression, you would see some impact on the quality of the image. In contrast, the lossless feature of the photo compressor can shrink the file without tampering with its quality. These tools are free and easy to use!
Set the dimensions of the image
You can also fix this problem by simply setting the image’s dimensions. You need to follow the guidelines of Google in this regard. Adding missing dimensions helps you make your images scalable by default, and you can put this weight off the shoulders of the browser. This would improve the load time of your website.
Convert your images to other formats
If you use heavy image formats like TIFF, you can use an online image converter to get new image files in lighter formats like JPG or PNG. You can easily convert your images for free with the help of online tools. Today the lightest image format is WebP; you can also use converters to get this format!
These are some solutions that can help you resolve the issues of large-sized images!
