Optimizing images on e-commerce websites

Uploading images to the website is a simple process, but so simple that we sometimes forget the importance of image optimization. Image optimization is not only about making images look better, but it also has the effect of improving visits to your website from search engines.

Optimizing e-commerce images before posting on the website is one of the important jobs you cannot ignore if you want to develop your website sustainably. This is something that any website is interested in, but to understand and choose the right optimization method, it is necessary to research carefully before implementing.

What is image optimization?

Image optimization is the process of shrinking the file size of your photographs as much as possible without sacrificing quality in order to keep page load times as low as possible. We also can understand it as image SEO. It means making your product and decorative photos appear in the high rankings of image search results on Google and other image search engines.

Why is it important to optimize images before uploading them to the website?

Image is a visually appealing element that transcends the linguistic barrier to elicit a wide range of emotions in viewers.

Images draw visitors' attention to the website by creating highlights and attracting their attention, making their perception of the website more appealing and instilling a sense of ease and relaxation.

It also makes it easier for consumers to remember and capture data. Rather than writing a lot of text, you may show the visitor an image, gif, video, or graph.

What is the impact of unoptimized images on the website?

• Page loading speed:

Optimizing e-commerce images is extremely important. Too many images with large file sizes make the page load time slow, bringing a bad experience to customers when shopping on the website. No one wants to wait. If your website takes too long to load, visitors get tired of waiting and they will quickly switch to another site that loads faster. You will lose potential customers and reduce your conversion rate because of it!

• Direct impact on SEO results:

Your website rank will drop in search engine result pages. Large files contribute to website slowdowns and search engines hate these slow websites. Google may also crawl and index your images slower for Google image searches.

• Storage space:

Unoptimized images with large files are not only heavy and slow down the page load speed, but also take up a lot of storage space. The space of the website that is occupied will affect the storage space of other tasks on the website, making you unable to manage the unused, redundant images.

How to optimize images for an eCommerce website?

Now, let discover the best ways to optimize website images with us!

• Choose your product angles and image proportions carefully

It is essential to provide pictures of different angles of the product. No one decides to buy a dress when only seeing the front photo of it, but not the back, side, etc. of that dress. You should not massively provide too many images, but select the necessary angles of the product to both provide good quality images, enough information for customers, and do not take up too much storage space.

As you know, online business is different from the traditional form of buying and selling goods that customers cannot directly "hold" the product, but can only rely on the images you provide on the website.

If the product illustrations are too low quality, unclear, lack the necessary amount of information, your website will not create trust with customers and lose sales opportunities. Therefore, for any product/service, you need to provide the best and clearest images under many shooting angles to be able to convey messages to users more clearly and vividly.

Consideration of the size the image will occupy on the web is just as important as the quality of the image. The height and width of the image mainly depend on the page layout you choose and the mobile interface if available. Choosing the right image size for each location on the website helps the image to be displayed in optimal quality. It not only makes the interface professional and cohesive but also makes the website work more efficiently.

In addition, you should also consider reducing the image file size to optimize storage, posting, and display. No customer wants to see images that are too large but have to wait too long to load or see blurry photos, right? You can try using TinyPNG - a simple and extremely easy-to-use image optimization tool that can help you reduce the maximum image size.

•  Image lazy load

The technique of lazy-loading images is most often mentioned in optimizing e-commerce images. Specifically, this technique is in sites that do not set image links, and only download images when the user surfs and it appears in the display area only. This is a very important thing for website optimization.

For example, when users visit a website with a lot of features (photos), sometimes they just go to the home page to walk around. And in the homepage, they only see the first interface, not sure if they have scrolled down and seen it all. In that case, why do we make the users wait for the browser to download all the features and all the images of the website when the users don’t need it or may not need it?

Lazy load is not only creation but also a great feature! Let's see the benefits that this feature can bring to your website!

• Solve performance problems: The browser will download all the images on the website, whether the users want to or not, or scroll and look at all of those images. Therefore, lazy-loading will help the browser to load fewer resources (images) and return results to the user faster. Any user would prefer websites to run faster than slow.
• Resource-saving: The delay of unnecessary resources helps to save CPU, GPU, memory, bandwidth ... especially on mobile devices with slow connection speeds.
• Improve user experience: Today, the number of users on mobile has surpassed even on desktop. If your page has too many images that slow down the page load speed, then the user will feel that it is a bad site and no longer want to come back next time.

If your website has not had this excellent feature yet, you should consider applying it to speed up page loading and experience the benefits it brings. Super Speed is a great suggestion, not only to help your website optimize images but also to optimize both database and site speed. You can see a demo of this function here!

• Choose the right file type

One of the best ways to optimize website images is by choosing the right file type. Each image file has a file extension that represents the format of the image. The most commonly used file extensions are .png, .jpeg, .gif. What you may not know is that each different format determines how an image displays differently.

Web design professionals will decide to choose the type of image file based on factors such as color, size, information density, etc. However, you only need a few basic understandings of file types and you don't need to be a web designer to optimize images.

• Make sure your thumbnails are optimized

Thumbnail images will be used on many e-commerce sites. They're a terrific method to skim through category pages fast without taking up too much room.

Thumbnail images are great, but they can "kill" your website load time silently. They're frequently presented at a critical point in the shopping process, and if they're slowing down your category page, you might lose a consumer. Keep in mind that the cumulative effect of thumbnails will have a significant impact on the time it takes for your website to load.

• Check your image quality

The goal of optimizing e-commerce images is to increase page loading speed, user experience, and your company profit. We've discussed how to reduce file sizes and have search engines index your photos, but what about experimenting with different images to see which ones convert the best?

Although the purpose of optimizing images and increasing page load speed is important, it is necessary to check the image quality after optimization. You need to make sure that the optimized image is still of good quality.

Improved loading speed is good, but low-quality images have the opposite effect on the customer experience. We can't because to load images, load pages faster, but sacrifice image quality. Because poor image quality is like you providing incomplete information, even creating discomfort for customers.

Optimizing e-commerce images is an extremely important part of a website. Not only does it help speed up page loading, but it also improves SEO rankings and user experience. However, we need to balance between image optimization and post-optimization quality to ensure the quality of the website. Are you applying any useful image optimization tips? Share with us below in the comments section. Have a nice day!