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11 Strategies forWordPress Image Optimization (A Complete Guide) 

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WordPress image optimization is crucial for the success of any website. A lot of ways that could improve the website’s performance but bulky, unoptimized image files can significantly slow down your WordPress website which is not good for SEO.

In this context, image optimization means keeping image file sizes small and manageable to ensure fast load times while maintaining high image quality. It can help your website convert visitors into customers and maintain a seamless user experience.

Given the significantly positive impact optimizing images can offer, this article will present a 3-step, 11-strategy guide to image optimization. While this guide is tailored to WordPress site owners, many of the tips we share can help improve site performance overall, regardless of the platform you’re working with.

Keep in mind throughout this guide, however, that image optimization is only one element in website performance. No matter whether you are creating the website directly from WordPress or using a host WordPress site, you also need to learn other actionable tips to help quicken your web page loading time.

Step 1. Optimize Images Before Uploading

Image optimization starts before you upload those photos to WordPress. The work to resize images and optimize them with lossless compression sets the foundation for a lightweight WordPress media library that won’t compromise page load time.

1. Choose the Right Image Format

Although image file formats can seem a little confusing, understanding the differences between vector images and raster images or JPEG and PNG files will ensure your WordPress images are always formatted correctly.

As a basic rule, it’s best to use JPEG or PNG files on WordPress sites. That’s because these image formats are supported by WordPress and most browsers, meaning they’re most likely to be seen by visitors without errors.

Using a more niche file format runs the risk of your images failing to display correctly. For instance, while WordPress supports GIF images, using them is more likely to lead to loading issues or distortion.

2. Optimize Your Image Size

Image optimization is all about efficiency, and that starts with image resizing.

If you’re intending to display a square image on a browser in 400x400 pixels, the most efficient image size to upload is 400x400. If you upload an 820×820-pixel image, you’re adding unnecessary pixels that may slow down the rendering time.

While it’s not exactly one-to-one, large images usually lead to larger file sizes. If you’re worried about file size, reducing your image dimensions is a good place to start.

3. Consider Using Image Compression

A great way to optimize your images is to ensure they’re lightweight. This means that the image data is used as efficiently as possible, and image compression allows you to achieve this.

Compression involves reducing the size of the file as much as possible without compromising the quality of the image. This is called lossless compression.

Although a WordPress image optimizer plugin can help with compressing images after they are uploaded, it’s best to do this beforehand to avoid wasting unnecessary resources. Any standard photo editing program should enable the compression of images for WordPress before you even upload them.

4. Carefully Select Featured Images

Unlike the images you’ll upload to the body of your WordPress posts, a featured image is used structurally throughout your site. You’ll find it in the header of the post, as well as in the post’s thumbnail or even in a footer, depending on your chosen WordPress theme.

Since featured images are a key part of most themes, you need to ensure that the dimensions and resolutions are consistent and correct. Also note that once you upload a featured image, it may be used in the post’s preview either on other web pages or social media sites, so make sure it is well-optimized.

Step 2. Optimize Your Images After Uploading

Even if you’ve followed the tips from the steps above, it’s still possible to improve the performance of existing images in your WordPress media library. Let’s review a few of these methods below.

5. Use Image Optimization Plugins

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Image optimization plugins for WordPress are by far the easiest way to optimize your images after uploading them to your site. Some of the most popular options include Smush, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, and WP Compress.

These tools can compress photos even if you’ve uploaded them uncompressed. More than this, an image optimization plugin will also help to optimize your photos for lazy loading and caching, and can even optimize image dimensions.

6. Lazy Load Images

Lazy loading is an excellent strategy for making the best use of your website bandwidth if there are multiple images displayed on a page.

Instead of trying to immediately load high-resolution images that are more than halfway down the page, lazy loading prioritizes content toward the top of the screen first. This means the site will serve images that are most relevant to the user as they are navigating the page.

7. Cache Images

It’s no secret that image caching can help improve site speed. Caching works by minimizing the amount of data that needs to be transferred from your website’s server via the WordPress database to your visitor’s browser.

Using a WordPress caching plugin, you can optimize load times by automatically caching images based on the settings you’ve set. This means faster loading times for your users, likely leading to higher conversions for your website.

Step 3. Optimize Images for SEO

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Search engine optimization is key to the success of most websites. With it, visitors are able to find your site more easily, your user experience will improve, and you’re likely to generate more leads.

Keep in mind that optimizing images for search engine results isn’t just about your media appearing on Google image searches. While it’s beneficial to have your content show up on Google image search results, having SEO-friendly images will help your web pages rank higher in general.

8. Add Appropriate, Keyword-Optimised Alt Text

When pages serve images, it’s not just users that see them, but also search engine bots.

Alt texts are a crucial part of image SEO. The alt text or alt tag is an attribute connected to an image in the page’s HTML code. Crawl bots can use this alt text to understand the image in the proper context.

To optimize an alt text, make sure that it includes an accurate description of what can be found in the image. You can also add any important keywords related to the contents of the picture and the page it’s embedded in.

Search engines use the information included in the alt attribute to correctly crawl and index images. This ensures that your website images and pages appear in relevant search results.

9. Don’t Forget Title Tags

Like the alt text, image titles tell both users and search engines important information about the image on the screen.

However, unlike alt tags which appear mainly to users for better web accessibility or when images fail to load, title tags are intended to give additional information about images in general and are not as strong a factor for SEO.

However, similar rules apply here as with alt text. Make sure that your title tags can capture visitors’ attention and accurately describe what the user sees in the image.

10. Carefully Consider Image Placements

Many may not realize this, but where you place images on a page affects the site’s ranking on most search engines, including Google. That means deciding the perfect placement for your images can impact how easy it is for potential visitors to find your website.

As a general rule, try and insert relevant images as close to its focus keywords and phrases as possible. When search engine bots crawl your site, they’ll assume that you have useful visual information to back up the information in your written content.

Of course, it’s better if you also use a keyword-rich caption for each of your images. This gives even more information to search engine crawl bots, allowing them to better index your website.

11. Create and Submit XML Image Sitemaps

If you want to speed up the process of having your website and its images indexed on Google, consider creating and submitting an XML sitemap for your website to boost its ranking.

You’ve probably noticed that all these SEO strategies are about giving search engine bots as much information as possible about your website. Image sitemaps are perfect for providing information about the visuals on your site, giving search engines the best possible chance of understanding your content accurately.

There are a number of plugins designed for WordPress that can help you create a sitemap. Two of the most popular options are Google XML Sitemaps and Yoast SEO.

Conclusion

Following the advice above should help cut your site’s loading time, improve the user experience, and help you rank better on Google. To see all the recommended strategies at a glance, let’s quickly recap the WordPress image optimization tips covered in this guide:

• Step 1. Optimize Images Before Uploading

o 1. Choose the right image format

o 2. Optimize your image size

o 3. Consider using image compression

o 4. Carefully select featured images

• Step 2. Optimize Your Images After Uploading

o 5. Use image optimization plugins

o 6. Lazy load images

o 7. Cache images

• Step 3. Optimize Images for SEO

o 8. Add relevant, keyword-optimized alt text

o 9. Don’t forget title tags

o 10. Carefully choose image placements

o 11. Submit XML image sitemaps