With the majority of people using smartphones on the web, it’s more important than ever to optimize for mobile to provide a greater user experience for both visual and load time.
According to Lilach Bullock on Business2Community,
- 64% of smartphone users expect your pages to load in less than 4 seconds
- On the web, customers expect your website to load in less than 2 seconds
- Website speed has a direct correlation to revenue; just one second more or less can hugely impact your sales
- Website speed is an important element of SEO and search engines take it into account when determining their ranking. Even as an SEO beginner, there is plenty that you can do to optimize your images and improve your website speed.
Do you have your .png confused with .jpg, or maybe even .gif? Wondering what the heck is the difference and does it matter which one I use? Maybe you haven’t even optimized any of your images on your website. Or, worse yet, have no idea how to optimize your images at all. It’s really not that hard, and once you have an understanding of the whys and hows, you’ll be surprised how little time it takes.
I found a great article that Lilach Bullock wrote outlining 4 Tips To Optimize Your Images for Web and Mobile
It’s a great article to get you motivated to optimize for mobile user experience.
There are a number of ways to shrink your images, from online sites to plugins for your website. A free online tool I have used is Tinypng.com – it’s fairly straight forward. A good wordpress plugin to use, and that you can also use to bulk optimize, is Short Pixel . It has a fairly good free version that optimizes up to 100 images a month. It also has a reasonably priced upgrade if you have a lot of pictures to do at once.