How to Optimize Images for Web and Performance
according to Google Best Practices

Images are visual descriptions of your brand and products.
And they do more than just give your audience a chance to see what you have to offer. They are critical when it comes to driving sales and shares.
You need them on your page.

But you can’t just add a few high-resolution pictures and be done with it.
Why? Because speed is the name of the game when it comes to web design.
If your site looks pretty but doesn’t load in the first five seconds, you can kiss those precious conversions goodbye.
Speed is a huge factor in driving traffic and conversions and producing general success.
And your site likely isn’t as speedy as it should be. In fact, according to Google, the majority of our sites don’t load fast enough.
This means that you are losing tons of conversions.
And the most likely reason is that your site design is too slow due to high resolution images.

As of January 2021 there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide - 59.5 percent of the global population. Of this total, 92.6 percent (4.32 billion) accessed the internet via mobile devices. Mobile devices need to download images and your website in the first seconds of visiting your website, high resolution and large file size images can drive mobile visitors away from your site instead of welcoming them.

How High Resolution Images can Ruin your Website

Your page size (the size in megabytes or kilobytes of all your page elements) is way too big. It’s causing slow load times and practically begging people to bounce (bounce means vistors visit your website but leave as the photos are taking too long to load).
Why? Because your images are taking up way too much space.
In fact, your images are probably taking up 99% of your page size.
And you need to fix that if you want increases in speed and subsequent conversions.
Having a slow site is not an option anymore.
So we know that you need images if you want to drive conversions.
But high resolution images can quickly add up when it comes to page size.
When compared to other page elements like text and buttons, images take up the most page space.
But most people go wrong by forgetting to optimize their graphics for page speed and the size of the page.

In 2020, Google released some critical data from a page speed study that showed the shocking slowness of our websites.
The first piece of data involved exactly what I am talking about right now:
Images taking up the majority of your page and carrying the most weight.
In fact, according to the Google report, the average website page weight in bytes is much larger than the best practices suggest:
When it comes to average page weight, the lower the better.
The smaller your page weight is in bytes, the faster it will load and the more conversions it will drive.
As far as best practices go, you want to shoot for fewer than 2mb.
But most pages are hitting more than 4MB in size!
That’s a far cry from where pages should be.
And what does the higher page weight produce? You guessed it: page speed issues.
The best practice for page speed is three seconds.
If your website doesn’t load in the first few seconds, you are risking valuable traffic and sales.
So, the larger the page, the longer the load time, which leads to negative effects on traffic and sales.
Google’s findings confirmed this. The longer your site takes to load, the higher the likelihood of a customer bouncing:

My images are sabotaging my website speed.
And by simply optimizing them, I can decrease their size by 78%.
That could potentially save me 2-3 seconds of speed and bring back my lost conversions.
That’s huge to both my visitors and Google.

Now, take a look at each image and see what the file size is:

253KB for a single image.
Or how about this image that I uploaded recently:
2MB for one small image.
And remember, according to Google, the best practice for page weight/size is less than 500KB.
So even just a few of those images simply uploaded and left unoptimized can cause your site to run incredibly slow.
Big images take up more space. When a visitor comes to your website, the browser takes longer to load because of those high-resolution images.

Conclusion
Images make your site look incredible. If you don’t have any images, you won’t convert visitors.
People love images because they connect with them emotionally. Pictures tell a story.
But if you have too many images, you risk huge impacts on speed.
And honestly, speed is probably the most critical factor when it comes to site traffic.
If your page takes 5+ seconds to load, you can guarantee that the user is clicking back to Google looking for the next website to solve their problem.
People don’t want to wait 5-10 seconds to get the content they need now.
Even if your site is conversion optimized, if you can’t get someone to actually reach your content, they aren’t going to convert.
And according to Google, most of us are suffering from this problem.
The few sites that aren’t are simply cashing in on our mistakes.
So, why is this happening?
Because 99% of your site page size is dominated by huge images.
Those beautiful product shots, videos, and features photos are taking up too much space.
They are causing your pages to slow down and drive away conversions.
But, if you follow the steps we discussed, it’s not too hard of a fix!
This is the biggest mistake that people make with website design.
Uploading images that are multiple megabytes in size will make your site run slower.
Fixing your page size can help you drive countless more visits and conversions fast.

Resize images to optimize page speed and appearance
With web images, you want to find the right balance between size and resolution. The higher your resolution, the larger the file size will be. In the world of print, high resolution images are a good thing. But on the web, large size, high resolution images can slow down your website’s page speed. This hurts your users’ experience and, eventually, your search engine ranking. Big images and slow load times are especially annoying for mobile visitors.

Trust us, you don’t want Google to hate your website. Fortunately, you can reduce your image’s file sizes to help improve your website’s performance. One problem with formatting them is that modifications often reduce their quality. That’s not a bad thing as long as you don’t make them ugly.

What Does It Mean to Optimize Images?
Large images slow down your web pages which creates a less than optimal user experience. Optimizing images is the process of decreasing their file size, which in turn speeds up the load time of the page.