Quantcast
Channel: Images – Build Your Own Business Website
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 14

Everything You Wanted to Know about the WordPress Media Library – Part 6 – Preparing Images for the Web

$
0
0

Next in this WordPress 3.9 Media Library series we’re going to talk about preparing images for the web in terms of what you should know. I’m not actually going to demonstrate how to prepare images for the web because we have a seminar, A Beginners Guide to Optimizing Images for the Web, that shows how to do that. So by all means watch that.

Naming Conventions

The first thing to do to prepare your images for the web is to make sure that there are no spaces in the name and no special characters. When you take a picture with your camera, it spits out a file name and then maybe when you import that you add a little preface giving you a file name that looks like perhaps like this, Forbidden 2004 050.jpg.

Names formatted like that work fine in Windows and on Mac machines but it does not work well online. There are many things that can break if you have spaces and special characters in your file names. So the first thing to do is to optimize your file names by making sure there are no spaces and no special characters.

Optimize the Size of the Image

The second thing you want to do is optimize the size of the image. Let’s look at these images here on my computer. You can see this is 3 megabytes and when I look at the properties, it says the properties are 2272 pixels wide by 1704 pixels tall at a resolution of 314 dpi. That is not a useful size on your website because it’s way too large.

Upload Images No Larger than Width of Your Page

The most you’re probably going to be displaying on your website is the full width of your page. So if the full width of your page is 1024 pixels wide then you don’t want to upload an image that’s 2272 pixels. Again, you don’t want to upload one any larger than the largest version that can be displayed.

Optimizing for the Correct Format

Another way of optimizing is by optimizing for the correct format. For example, if you had a scenic picture like this as a png instead of as a jpg, you’d want to convert it to a jpg because the png is going to be so much larger than a jpg. Jpgs were designed to display this kind of image. The Optimizing Images seminar I just mentioned talks about why and how to choose the correct format at length.

Optimize the Quality of the Images

You also want to optimize the quality of it because most of the image types have different quality settings. So you can set the quality settings optimizing it for appearance on a computer monitor. An image that looks really good on your computer monitor looks crappy when it’s printed and that’s because the printed dots per inch is much finer than the display dots per inch on a computer monitor. You can have a much lower quality image and it still looks as good on a computer monitor.

Why Optimize Your Images?

You want to optimize images down for size and quality. So, still looking at this same Forbidden image, you can see it was originally 3.2megs but once I optimized the image you can see it’s now only 71 kilobytes. That’s about 2% of the size.

Site Speed

You can imagine how much slower your website will be if you are trying to load 2.7 gigabyte images rather than 71k images. It significantly reduces your site speed if you do not optimize your images.

Speed Affects SEO

The second thing that happens when you have a slower site is that it hurts you for Search Engine Optimization. Everybody knows that Google favors sites that load quickly so if your site loads slowly that will adversely affect your ability to have your site show up in relevant search results.

One thing you can do about that is to make sure that you always are using optimized images and so this is why you want to optimize your images for the web.

Backup of Your Site

Then the final reason for doing that is because of your backup size. If you have hundreds of images and they’re all 3 gigabytes, even if the 3 gigabyte size images are not being displayed, it’s still being stored so when you do a backup of your site your backups become huge. The backup of a site with optimized images still gets really big.

Those are the 3 best reasons for making sure that you optimize your images. The first one is it speeds your site up which then positively affects the second one which is your search engine visibility and then the third one is it makes backing your site up smaller and the smaller the better really when you’re doing that.

Google’s Image Search and Meta Tags in Images

Ed asked, “If your image had meta tags attached, would it help with the SEO?” No, it would not help with the SEO except perhaps for Google’s image search. Google’s image search might look at those meta tags and so there may be a benefit there. I mean if this is the Edward Crosby that I think it is, you’re an artist and an illustrator and you have lots of images of your illustrations on your site, therefore somebody may well be looking for your work via an image search making that a rational effort for your situation.

Once upon a time, I was getting lots of hits because people were looking for a For Sale button so I changed the name of the silly image because I didn’t want traffic to my site because they were looking for a For Sale button. I wanted traffic to the site because they were looking for the content that was important to me.

But if you are a photographer or a graphic artist or maybe even a web designer, anything that you might take photos of or that you could add those kinds of meta tags to might in fact help you on SEO. For guys like me, it’s no use at all because that’s not what we’re doing. Image search really doesn’t play an important role in finding BYOBWebsite.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 14

Trending Articles