Image optimization for e-commerce
In today’s e-commerce world, the visual presentation of products is a key factor that influences sales. That’s why it’s important to provide high-quality, attractive and professional product photos to attract customers’ attention. However, it is equally important that these images are properly optimized for file size and performance to ensure fast page loading and excellent user experience. After all, you don’t want customers who have weaker Internet connections to have to wait a long time for a picture of the product they want to see to load. This will cause frustration, and from that it’s only a step to them shutting down your site, which for you means losing a customer. Optimizing images for e-commerce is important, so in this article we will discuss some key steps to help you achieve it.
Optimizing images for e-commerce – how to do it right?
Below we suggest how to carry out such optimization and what key elements are necessary for success in this regard. Keep in mind that all these activities are aimed at improving the functionality of your store and making the customer have a positive shopping experience.
Select the appropriate file format.
The two most popular formats for photos and complex visualizations are JPEG and PNG. JPEG is ideal for photos with great detail and smooth color gradients, providing a small file size without sacrificing significant image quality. PNG is more suitable for images with transparent backgrounds or those that have a lot of detail, e.g.: graphics, graph. Another popular format is WebP, which offers good photo quality with a small size. It is becoming more widely used and almost every browser now supports it. Allegro only supports files in this format. Therefore, it is definitely worth paying your attention to it. Before choosing a file format, think about what kind of photos you intend to put on the site and adjust the format accordingly. What’s important when it comes to optimizing images and graphics on WooCommerce is that the JPEG format compresses the file with a slight loss in quality, but this significantly reduces the file size. In the case of PNG, the compression is much lower, but it is carried out without loss of quality. Both of these solutions have their pros and cons, so it all depends on the specific situation and demand.
Adjust the resolution.
Leaving aside file formats and size, equally important is file resolution, which is measured in dots per inch (DPI) and thus determines image quality. For images for e-commerce, a resolution of 72 DPI is sufficient for display on device screens and does not make the page load slower. There is no need to use a higher resolution, which only unnecessarily increases the file size. Before publishing your photos, adjust their resolution to 72 DPI. You can do this with a graphic editor.
Optimization for SEO.
Although the image placed on the page is understandable to the user, the search engine may have more problems. To help her read and understand the photo, then complete the alt attribute. In the simplest terms, it is an alternative description for a picture, which should reflect what is illustrated in it. What should a well-described alt attribute look like? First of all, it should correspond to the real content of the photo or graphic. It is important to include keywords, but in moderation. The idea is not to throw in as many keywords as possible, but to add one or two. It is worth noting that not only the alt attributes, but also the file name matters. Use hyphens and descriptive names, e.g.: shirt-cotton-striped.jpg, as it will say much more about the image content than a name like: DSC000854.jpg.
As you can see, optimizing images for e-commerce is also an important part of building a store and strengthening its position in search engines.
