How do you get fast-loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

The addition of these images on your store's website can cost you. With each large photo or media file you add to a product page, the load time increases. Your customers regardless of how engaged they might be, aren't willing to sit for for long.

Store owners often have to answer is: How do I increase speed of loading images with a beautiful, high-resolution look? It might sound like a challenge, but there's actually quite a couple of simple methods to ensure that you balance fast product photos and fantastic images.

First, let's have an overview of why website speed is important. We'll then go over the ways you can improve the loading time of your photos but still maintain their quality.

Why the speed of your website is important (hint that it's not only about SEO)

There are several reasons why having fast-loading photographs of your products is as essential as having appealing photos. One of the reasons that proprietors of stores think of first concerns the search engine.

It's true that faster sites are more effective in search rankings, everything else being equal. And the higher up you rank on rankings, the greater organic search traffic you'll drive to your site. However, SEO isn't the only reason why speed is crucial. Google only made speed a ranking element initially in order to prioritize User Experience (UX) on the web.

What it boils in the end: shoppers don't want to sit around waiting. They don't want to be waiting for shipments and they do not want to wait for answers They certainly don't want to wait for your store to load. If you give prospective customers a slow, laggy product page, well what will that say regarding their interaction with you?

Also, while huge image file sizes can cause slow-loading pages, which could hurt search engine optimization, these slow pages can also -- more importantly -- irritate your shoppers. And that's why it's so vital to find the right the right balance between speed and beauty.

So, with that thought in mind, let's move on to the methods you can use to make your photo files smaller, while still preserving their quality.

Keep images saved to WebP or JPEG formats unless you require transparency.

The general consensus is that WebP is the best option, and JPEG as second best except if you need to be transparent due to a reason. If transparency is required then you must choose transparent PNG.

Some formats are bigger or aren't as suitable for web compression. And while you might be inclined to put an hilarious animated GIF for the product's page it's best to reconsider. The cost of loading isn't worth the brief chuckle the customers may experience.

Let's take a glance at the sizes of files for this picture of the cup of tea set against white background, when it is stored in the more popular formats for images. The image was not compressed on this file. These are the only file sizes that were saved when the image was with a resolution of 1280x853 pixels. resolution.

As you can see, the most compact file format is WebP format, which is followed by JPEG as a close second. The largest file size is the TIF the file type. The GIF file is nearly twice the size of a WebP file. If this was an animated GIF then it'd be even larger.

The images are not just saved in different sizes and at their best quality, but they have various compression options also. After running image file optimization for each of these images in Photoshop with settings that resulted with images that were similar in image quality, here are the results:

The WebP image again saved to its smallest sizewhich was by a vast distance. The JPEG has also decreased its file size considerably. The PNG was not able to see any reduction in size and the diminution in dimensions of GIF was not significant. Using LZW compression for the TIFF image saved an enormous quantity of the file's size as well, but the resulting file size is more than 2.5x bigger than the original uncompressed WebP image.

If you have many thousands of files stored on your website, you can see how compressing WebP or JPEG documents can help you save plenty of space, and make the loading times of your images relatively fast.

Note: AVIF is another image format which is believed to have even better compression as WebP. Although it does have wide support, it's still not as popular like WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to process images, you'll need to install a plug-in to open AVIF images and save them to AVIF format.

Utilize image compression to produce Web-friendly images

The customers want photos of products which are huge, detail-oriented, and can be zoomed in on (if you have an option to zoom on your site, that's). Thankfully, this is easily achievable by using the software for image compression.

A lot of these programs are so effective that an untrained eye is in awe of the distinction between compressed and uncompressed images.

Prior to compressing your photos You'll need to figure out what the maximum file size is at which your images will be displayed. Mobile devices tend to use high-resolution displays that have higher resolution as compared to desktop computers. However, higher-resolution displays are becoming frequent on desktop computers.

It is possible that a 500px wide image displaying in a 500px-wide space doesn't look that great and a 800px or 1000px-wide image looks better constrained to 500px when displayed on a retina desktop or smartphone display.

Try experimenting with the image sizes to find out what the best balance is for your products. Additionally, if you are using a zoom function to your images of products You'll need to select larger images than if you had thumbnails.

When you've established which your max pixel size will be, then you're able to proceed to convert the original product images in high resolution to web-ready, optimized images.

We'll take a look some of the software you can use to create quick-loading images for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using any version of Adobe Photoshop, there are various ways to save your images in optimized formats. It is possible to use the Save As feature. Just don't forget to change the name of your file when saving the file with the same file format that the original file. You can also use Export to or the legacy Save for Weboption (until the time it's no longer supported).

Each of these options includes steps within the save process that will allow you to adjust your image compression settings. Each option will have some different features and options.

• The only way to save is Save As. Save as can allow users to save the WebP file.
• The only two options, Export to as well as Save For Web permit you to adjust the pixel dimensions of your images in the process of saving. If you are using Save as then you'll have adjust your image's size to the size you'd like it to be to be in Photoshop in the beginning.
• The older Save For Web option is the only one that will show you the approximate time to load and resulting file size before saving your image. It also allows you to change the your animation loop's settings for the GIF, and offer specific options for what information to include or not in your file.

The other choices in each method are the same -- decide whether to keep or eliminate metadata, or embed the color profile of your choice, and then adjust the quality of your image (lossy or lossless).

Are you not using Photoshop? No problem: try one of these free online tools

Not everyone has access to Photoshop However, this shouldn't be a reason to put you off. There are plenty of free online tools that can reduce the size of your images.

Two of the top are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. The two tools reduce your photos to a surprisingly small size while still preserving their quality.

After the software is done uploading your images you'll be able to save them, and include them in your store.

The two applications' free versions come with some restrictions regarding the number of files, and/or the maximum size that they can upload, so it may be somewhat more laborious in comparison to Photoshop or their paid plans. However, it is cost-free and if you do not have a huge store with hundreds of products and/or products, this could work for you.

Do you have a WordPress account ? Change the WordPress settings or try the plugin

You may or may not realize that compression of images is integrated into WordPress. It compresses JPEG files to 82% of their original size however, this may not be enough for stores who prefer huge high-detailed, detailed photos or huge galleries.

The best way to manage this compression built into WordPress is to edit the WordPress functions.php file. This allows you to enhance -- or even decrease the amount of automatic compression, depending on what you like the level of compression automatically occurring prior to the images being uploaded into the Media Library.

Are you looking for a simpler route? It is always a good idea to try using a plugin. ShortPixel comes with its own, which works for nearly every type of file which includes Apple's HEIC format, so you are able to upload images straight from your iPhone. If you sign up for a free account, you get 100 credits per month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Although the latest Internet connections as well as improved capacity of hosting have speeded up the amount of time required for customers to visit your store, there can remain connectivity issues. They can cause slow load times, especially if your customer is located around the world from where your server is situated.

Luckily, there's a method to speed things up for these files (and not just for those large files such as product images, either). A content delivery network (CDN) shows files stored on servers located which are located close to users rather than content that is available on demand from a single location. It improves the user browsing experience for all your shoppers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. Your visitors will also get material directly from the CDN server close to their. Both of these things speed down load times dramatically in particular for big photos and media files.

Along with compression, utilizing CDNs in conjunction with compression CDN can be a great way to serve product photos super swiftly and efficiently, particularly when you do not update your shop on a regular schedule. Also, in the event that something requires immediate updates then you'll need to turn off the CDN off.

A few other ways you can balance fast and fantastic

The suggestions above are the largest, most important things you can achieve a good balance between product photos that look nice and load swiftly. Here are additional tips to bear on your the back of your mind:

• Choose White backgrounds. In general, the less colours an image is made up of more colors, the less size is. It is also true once compression comes into play and the palette is further reduced.
• Eliminate unnecessary product shots. Do you have photos of the shoes you're selling from ten different perspectives? You can probably reduce it to five and cut the loading time in half.
• Load thumbnails first then only display the entire size when you click. This way shoppers will expect to wait for the bigger photos.
• lazy load of images. Lazy loading images increases page performance by loading images over the fold and loading other images once users scroll where they are on the page. The Jetpack plugin is not just a CDN functionality, but also lazy loading for images. Jetpack is also a host of various WordPress optimization tools that, while not necessarily directly linked to images, could improve performance and improve the experience of users.
• Remove irrelevant metadata. Depending on the reason for your photo file, you might contain a significant amount of metadata like copyright information Keywords, tags, geographic data, image descriptions, etc. In some cases you might want to preserve this data, but you can also save some space by eliminating it when you compress your images.

Beautiful product images shouldn't be required to slow down your site (or your buyers)

There's a chance that the only method to create stunning product photos is to settle with a slow-loading store or that the only option to get quick-loading product pages is to opt for small, highly-compressed photos. However, we disagree.

With just a few improvements to the photos you sell, you can find the perfect balance between fast-loading and gorgeous-looking. Also, neither your website -- nor your shoppers -- will have to speed up.