How to Get Fast-Loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

However, adding these photos on your store's website can cost you. With each large photo or media files you add to the product's page loading time is increased. And your shoppers however interested they may be, aren't willing to be waiting for for long.

Store owners often find themselves asking is this What can I do to accelerate image loading speed and still maintain a stunning appearance? This may sound like a daunting task, but there's actually quite number of ways that can be used to achieve speedy product images and stunning image quality.

First, let's have an overview of why website speed is important. In the next section, we'll discuss some tips for how you can improve the loading time of your product photos but still maintain their quality.

How fast your site's speed is crucial (hint that it's not only about SEO)

There are a few reasons for why loading speedy product photos is just as important as having attractive ones. The one that most store owners think of first involves search engines.

It's true that faster sites have better performance when it comes to search results, but all other things considered equal. The higher your rank in the searches, the more organic traffic from search engines you'll bring to your site. It's not the only reason that speed is important. Google only made speed a ranking element at the beginning so that it could prioritize User Experience (UX) on the internet.

Let's see what it all comes at: shoppers don't want to wait. They don't wish to wait for delivery times and they do not want to sit around waiting for answers They certainly don't want to wait for your store to load. So if you offer your potential customers the slow and sluggish product page, well, what does that say about their overall encounter with your company?

So while large image size can result in slow loading pages which can harm search engine optimization, these slow pages may also irritate your customers. importantly -- irritate the customers. That's why it's crucial to find that perfect equilibrium between beautiful and fast.

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.

Make sure to save images for later use in 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 for some reason. In the event that transparent is necessary then you must choose transparent PNG.

Other formats are larger or aren't as suitable for web compression. And while you might be inclined to put the funny animated GIF for your product page it's best to reconsider. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. isn't worth the brief chuckle that your customers might experience.

Take a glance at the sizes of files in this photo of the cup of tea set against white backgrounds when it was saved using one of the more popular formats for images. There was no compression of the image on the image. These are just the size of the files that were saved when the image was with a resolution of 1280x853 pixels. resolution.

As you can see, the smallest size file is WebP file, with JPEG being a close second. The largest file size is in the TIF file format. It is estimated that the GIF file is almost twice as large as the WebP file. If it were an animated GIF, it would be more than twice as large.

The images are not just saved at different file sizes at their best quality, but they possess distinct compression capabilities also. After running image file optimization on each of the above image files in Photoshop with settings that resulted with images that were similar in to their visual quality, the following were the outcomes:

The WebP image was saved again to its smallest size- and by a very wide distance. The JPEG also reduced its size significantly. Its PNG was not able to see any reduction in size as the decrease in the file dimensions of GIF was not significant. Utilizing LZW compression for the TIFF image saved an enormous amount of size also, however the resultant file is still over 2.5x larger than the non-compressed WebP image.

If you've got hundreds of images on your site You can observe the advantages of compressing WebP or JPEG files would save you plenty of space, and make the loading times of your images relatively rapid.

NOTE: AVIF is another image format which is believed to offer better compression as WebP. Even though it has broad support but it's not as widely supported in the same way as WebP. If you use Adobe Photoshop to edit pictures, you'll need install a plug-in that can open AVIF files and save them in AVIF format.

Use image compression to create ready for web.

Shoppers want product photos which are huge, detailed, and able to be zoomed-in on (if you've got the zoom feature enabled in your website, that's). Thankfully, this is easily possible with image compression software.

Many of these applications are so effective that the untrained eye becomes not able to distinguish between uncompressed and compressed images.

Prior to compressing your photos You'll need to figure out what the maximum file size is that your pictures are displayed. Mobile devices typically have larger resolution screens with higher pixel density than desktop computers, although high-definition displays are becoming more popular on desktops.

It is possible that a wide 500px image displaying in a 500px-wide space isn't very appealing, and a 800px or 1000px-wide image is better suited to 500px when displayed on the retina display of a smartphone or desktop display.

Play around with your image sizes to see where the best balance is to fit your product. Additionally, if you are providing a zoom option on your images for products it is recommended to choose bigger images than if you had thumbnails.

After you've determined what your maximum pixel dimensions should be, you can move on to converting your original high-res product photos into optimized web-ready photos.

Let's take a look at some of the programs that can be used to generate quick-loading images on your website.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using the latest version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your images using optimised formats. It is possible to use the Save to option, but don't forget to change the file's name, when saving the file with the same file format that the original file. Additionally, you can utilize Export as or the old Save option for Weboption (until the time it's no longer supported).

Each one of these options includes steps within the process of saving that permit you to alter your image compression settings. But, they do come with different options and options.

• Save As is the only option. Save as can allow you to save the WebP file.
• The only two options, Export to as well as Save For Web allow you to modify the pixel size of your image in the process of saving. If you're making use of Save As it is necessary to resize your image to the dimensions you want it to be in Photoshop first.
• The legacy Save For Web option is the only choice which will display an estimated loading time as well as the the size of the file after exporting your image. This feature allows you to change the parameters for the animation loop on the GIF as well as provide granular options on what metadata to include or not in your image.

The rest of the alternatives in all of the methods are the same -- decide whether to keep or omit metadata, embed your color profile and adjust image quality (lossy as well as lossless).

No Photoshop? Problem solved: Try one of these free online tools

Many people don't have access to Photoshop however that shouldn't hold you back. There are many free online tools that can compress your photos.

Two of the top are Kraken Image Optimizer as well as ShortPixel. Both tools shrink your images down to a tiny dimensions while still maintaining their quality.

After the software is done uploading your images you'll have the option to save them, and add them to your store.

These programs' free versions contain some limitations in terms of number of files and/or maximum file size that they can upload and therefore it could be somewhat more time-consuming of a process than using Photoshop or the paid plan. But it is free and if you do not have a huge inventory of goods it could be the perfect solution for you.

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

There's a chance that you don't be aware that image compression is integrated into WordPress. The compression reduces the size of your JPEGs to 82% of their original size, but that might not suffice for websites who prefer huge, highly-detailed photos or large galleries.

Another option to manage this compression built into WordPress is to edit WordPress's functions.php file. This will allow you to increase -- or decrease or decrease, depending on your preference the quantity of compression automatically occurring before your photos are uploaded to the Media Library.

Are you looking for a simpler way? You can always try a plugin. ShortPixel is a plugin version that works for just about any file type including Apple's HEIC format. You can insert images from your iPhone. With a free account, you will receive 100 credits every month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

While new Internet connectivity and better hosting capabilities have sped up the time it takes for shoppers to access your store, there can there be issues with connectivity. They can cause slow load times, especially if your customer is located around distance away from where your server is located.

Luckily, there's a method to improve speed for these files (and it's not only for larger files, like photos of products, either). A Content delivery network (CDN) displays files stored on servers located which are located close to users instead of on-demand content that is delivered from one location. It improves the user shopping experience for everyone customers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. The visitors will also be able to access material directly from the CDN server that's closest to them. Both of these things speed up load time dramatically, especially for large photos and media file sizes.

Together with compression, utilizing a CDN is an excellent way to serve product photos extremely swiftly particularly if you don't update your store on a frequent basis. Of course, if you need to update your store in a hurry then you'll need to turn off the CDN off.

There are other methods to achieve balance that is fast and fantastic

These suggestions are the largest, most important things you can achieve a good balance between images of products that appear nice and load swiftly. However, here are some other tips to keep in the back of your mind:

• Opt for background that is white. Generally speaking, the fewer colors an image contains more colors, the less size is. This is even more relevant when compression is in play and the palette is smaller.
• Eliminate unnecessary product shots. Do you have images of your shoes that you're selling from 10 different perspectives? Then you can reduce the number to five angles and cut your duration of the loading process by half.
• Load thumbnails first then only display full-size images when clicked. So, shoppers don't have to wait for the bigger pictures.
• lazy load of images. Lazy loading images improves page speed by only loading images over the fold. It also loads other images as users scroll to their position at on the page. The Jetpack plugin is not just a CDN capabilities, but it also offers lazy loading for images. Jetpack also has additional WordPress optimization tools that, though not necessarily directly linked to images, could improve speed and enhance the experience of users.
• Strip any unnecessary metadata. Depending on the purpose of your image files, you could contain a significant amount of metadata like copyright information, keywords tags, geographical data such as descriptions of images, and so on. Sometimes it is possible to preserve this data, however, you could also free the space in your files by not storing it in the process of compressing your images.

Amazing product images don't have to slow down your site (or your buyers)

The only way to have gorgeous product photos is to settle for a sluggish store, or that the only option to speed up loading pages is to settle for tiny, highly-compressed photos. We disagree.

By making a couple of adjustments to your photos of products, you can find the ideal balance between speedy loading and stunning. And neither your site or your customers should be slowed down.