How To Get Quick-Loading Amazing-Looking Product Images

The addition of these images to your online store can also come at a price. For every large image or media file you add to a product page loading time is increased. And your shoppers regardless of how engaged they might be, aren't willing to wait for for long.

The question store owners find themselves asking is this What can I do to speed up image loading while retaining a high-resolution appearance? This may sound like a challenge, but there are actually quite a few simple ways to balance speedy product images and stunning image quality.

First, let's have an overview of why website speed matters. Then, we'll go over some suggestions on how you can decrease the load time of your photos but still maintain their quality.

The speed of your website is important (hint this: it's more than just about SEO)

There are several reasons why having fast-loading images of products is equally crucial as having beautiful ones. The reason that many proprietors of stores think of first concerns the search engine.

There is no doubt that sites with speed have better performance on search engine results, with regardless of other factors. Also, the higher up you are in searches, the more organic search traffic you'll drive towards your website. It's not the sole reason speed is so important. Google only made speed a ranking element initially in order to give priority to User Experience (UX) on the internet.

Let's see what it all comes down to: shoppers don't want to sit around waiting. They don't want to wait for delivery times, they don't want to be waiting for responses or answers, and certainly do not need to wait around for your site to load. So if you offer a potential customer an unresponsive, slow site, what does that say about the rest of their experience with you?

Also, while huge image size can result in slow loading pages that potentially hurt search engine optimization, these slow pages can also -- more importantly -- irritate the customers. This is why it's important to strike that equilibrium between beautiful and fast.

So, with that thought in mind we can now look at how you can utilize these methods to make your photo files smaller, while still preserving their quality.

Save images in WebP or JPEG formats unless you require transparency

The general consensus is that WebP should be the first format of choice with JPEG as second best except if you need to be transparent for some reason. In the event that transparency is required then you must choose a transparent PNG.

Other formats are larger or more difficult to use for online compression. While you may be inclined to put the humorous animated GIF on the product's page, you should probably reconsider. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. isn't worth the brief chuckle that your customers might experience.

We'll glance at the sizes of files for this image of the cup of tea set against white background, when it is it was saved using one of the popular image formats. No image compression was run on this file. This is just the file sizes for saving the image at 1280x853 pixels at full resolution.

You can see that the smallest file is the WebP format, which is followed by JPEG being a close second. The biggest size of file is in the TIF files format. This GIF file is nearly twice as large as the WebP file. If this were some kind of animated GIF the file would be larger.

Not only do images save in different sizes and at their highest quality, they also have various compression options also. After running image file optimization on all of the above image files using Photoshop using settings that resulted with images that were similar in image quality, here are the results:

The WebP image is saved at the size of the file with the lowest amount of datain a large margin. The JPEG was also able to reduce the size of its files by a significant amount. The PNG did not see any reduction in size as the decrease in the file size of the GIF was minimal. The use of LZW compression on the TIFF image, it saved a significant quantity of the file's size as however, the final image is over 2.5x larger than the non-compressed WebP document.

If you've got thousands of files on your website, you can see the advantages of compressing WebP or JPEG documents can help you save lots of space and keep your loading time for images fairly fast.

Note: AVIF is another image format which is believed to be more compressible as WebP. Even though it's got widespread support, it's still not as widely supported as WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to edit images, you'll need to install a plugin to open AVIF files and save them in AVIF format.

Use image compression to create ready for web.

The customers want photos of products that are large, highly detailed, and able to be zoomed into (if there is an option to zoom on your website, that's). It is thankfully possible with image compression software.

A lot of these programs are so effective that an untrained eyesight is in awe of the distinction between uncompressed and compressed images.

Before compressing your images, you'll want to determine what the largest file size will be at the point where your photos will appear. Mobile devices tend to use high-resolution displays that have higher pixels per inch as compared to desktop computers. However, HD displays are increasingly common on desktop.

It is possible that a 500px wide image that is displayed on a 500px width does not look very good. Likewise, a 800px or 1000px-wide image looks better constrained to 500px for the retina display of a smartphone or desktop display.

Try experimenting with the image dimensions to determine what you can find the most balance for your items. Also, if you're providing a zoom option to your images of products it is recommended to choose bigger images than if you were only using thumbnails.

After you've determined the maximum size of your pixel will be, then you're able to proceed to convert your high-resolution product images to web-ready, optimized images.

Let's look at some of the software that can be used to generate quick-loading images for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using every version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your pictures in optimised formats. You can use the Save to option, but be sure to modify your file name if you are saving it with the same file format as the original file. You can also make use of Export to as well as the older Save for Weboption (until the time it's no longer supported).

Each option include steps in the save process that will let you adjust your settings to compress images. Each option will come with different options and capabilities.

• Save As is the only option. Save As can allow users to save an WebP file.
• Only Export as and Save for Web let you alter the dimensions of your images in the process of saving. If you're making use of Save As then you'll have to resize your image to the dimensions you want it to be in Photoshop first.
• The old Save for Web feature is the only option that will show you the approximate time to load and the size of the file after exporting your image, allow you to change the parameters for the animation loop on the GIF, and offer the option to choose what metadata to include or not in the file.

The other alternatives in all of the methods remain the same: decide whether to keep or eliminate metadata, or embed the color profile of your choice, as well as adjust the image's quality (lossy or non-lossy).

Are you not using Photoshop? Don't worry: you can try one of these free online tools

There aren't many people who have access to Photoshop, but this shouldn't be a reason to put you off. There are a lot of free online tools that can make your photos smaller.

Two of the most effective are Kraken Image Optimizer as well as ShortPixel. Both tools shrink your images to an astonishingly small size while still preserving quality.

When the tool is finished uploading your images you'll be able save them to your computer and then upload them to your online store.

The two programs' free versions come with some restrictions regarding the number of files, and/or the maximum size that they can upload as well, which means it's somewhat more laborious of a process than using Photoshop or their paid plans. But it is cost-free and if you don't have a large inventory of goods it could be a great fit.

Are you using a plugin ? Change the WordPress settings or test a plugin

It is possible to not know that image compression is built right into WordPress. This compression shrinks your JPEGs to 82 percent of the size they were originally however, this may not suffice for websites who prefer huge, highly-detailed photos or large galleries.

The best way to manage this compression built into WordPress is to edit WordPress's functions.php file. This allows you to increase -- or decrease the amount of automatic compression, depending on what you like -- the amount of automatic compression which occurs prior to your images hitting your Media Library.

Are you looking for a simpler way? Try an application. ShortPixel is a plugin plugin, and it works with just about any file type including Apple's HEIC format. You can add images directly from your iPhone. If you sign up for a free account, you can get 100 credits each month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though modern Internet connectivity and better hosting capabilities have sped up the time it takes for a shopper to load your store, there can there be issues with connectivity. They can cause slow loading times, particularly if your customer is located around distance away from where your server is situated.

Luckily, there's a method to speed things up for them (and not just for those bigger files like product photos, either). A content delivery network (CDN) display the stored content on servers that are physically close to visitors instead of content on demand in a single place. 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. Visitors will also receive material via the CDN server that's close to their. These two things can speed the loading time by a significant amount, especially for large photos and media files.

Together with compressing, utilizing a CDN can be a great way to serve product photos very swiftly particularly when you do not update your website on a regular basis. Also, in the event that you need to update your store in a hurry it is possible to shut off your CDN off.

Other ways that you can balance fast and fantastic

The suggestions above are the biggest, and most significant things you could achieve a good balance with photos of your products that look great and load fast. However, here are some additional tips to bear on your the back of your mind:

• Choose background that is white. Generally speaking, the fewer colors an image contains and the fewer colors it has, the smaller its file size will be. This is even more relevant when compression is in play and the palette is further reduced.
• Eliminate unnecessary product shots. Do you have photographs of the shoes you're selling from ten different perspectives? Then you can reduce the number to five angles and cut your load time by half.
• load thumbnails first, and only bring up the entire size when you click. This way shoppers will expect to have to wait for bigger photos.
• lazy load of images. Lazy loading images improves page speed by only loading images above the fold and loading other images as users scroll to where they're at on the page. The Jetpack plugin not only offers CDN capabilities, but it also offers lazy loading for images. Jetpack additionally offers additional WordPress optimization tools that, though not necessarily directly linked to images, could improve speed and enhance user experience.
• Strip any unnecessary metadata. Depending on the nature of the image files, you could have a large amount of metadata like copyright information, keywords tags, geodata such as descriptions of images, and so on. In some cases it is possible to preserve this data, but you may also be able to save some file space by omitting it in the process of compressing the images.

Incredible product photos don't need to slow your website (or your shoppers)

It might seem like the only method to create stunning product photos is to settle for a sluggish store, or the best way to speed up loading pages is to settle for tiny, highly-compressed photos. However, we disagree.

Just a couple optimizations to your product photos, you can find an ideal balance of speedy loading and gorgeous-looking. Also, neither your website -- or the customers need to speed up.