How to Optimize Images for Your Website

 

 

If you have a blog/website you probably use images because they add more engagement to your site and attract attention.

It’s hard to imagine a blog without images.

They are important for your blog. If you don’t use them most likely you lose most of your visitors.

When it comes to images you can find free images or you can buy them.

I will talk about it within my review. You need to use only high quality images.

It’s important in terms of trust.

If you use bad images you can lose your visitors. But high quality images can be different in size.

One image can be 5,6 MB in size which means it will take time to load.

If you have 5 images within one post it will take even more time to load all those images.

This can negatively impact your page load time and as a result you can lose your rankings.

Losing rankings means losing traffic and sales.

Especially now, website load and speed time became a ranking factor.

If your site takes 15-20 seconds to load you can lose most of your visitors.

Your site rankings will most likely drop. That’s why it’s very important to optimize images before using them on your website.

There are different ways to optimize images and I’m going to show you those ways and also I will show you places where you can download free images or buy images.

 

Where to find images?

As I said, there are many places online where you can find images.

Some images are free while others are paid.

Free images can be found in Google. For this you use Google image search.

Once you found images you click “Usage rights” and then click “Labeled for reuse”.

 

 

 

Some images may be free while others are not. To know exactly you need to click “Visit page” and see for image details.

Images that have CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) attribute are 100% free to use.

There are some other places where you can find free images too.

Again, some of them are 100% free while others are not 100% free.

You need to check image details before using them.

 

• http://www.lifeofpix.com/
• http://www.pexels.com/
• http://picography.co/
• http://www.gratisography.com/
• http://skitterphoto.com/
• http://stokpic.com/
• http://www.clker.com/
• http://www.pdpics.com/
• http://pickupimage.com/
• https://mystock.themeisle.com/
• https://unsplash.com/
• http://libreshot.com/
• http://freenaturestock.com/
• https://www.stockfreeimages.com/

 

Some images may require to link to the original place where you downloaded them from. If you like the image you can use it but keep the link to the image.

Some images may be too big in size. In that case you can search for online image resize programs and resize your desired image before using it.

It’s very simple and easy to do. You can choose any of those sites below from the list:

 

• https://www.befunky.com/features/resize-image/
• https://resizeimage.net/
• http://www.picresize.com/
• http://www.simpleimageresizer.com/
• https://imageresize.org/
• https://www.photoresizer.com/

 

I can also recommend another place where you not only use free images but get quality training on affiliate marketing, high quality support and all tools required for your online business, such as keyword research tool, web hosting platform, website builder, domain for your website, content editor.

 

 

 

The content editor comes with a classic editor, image resizer, all in one place. This platform is awesome.

I honestly recommend to take advantage of this platform.

You can start with a free account first and then decide whether you want to upgrade your account or not. First, start with a free account.

 

Paid images

You can also buy images. There are different places I can recommend.

• https://www.shutterstock.com
• https://www.onepixel.com
• https://www.bigstockphoto.com
• https://www.istockphoto.com/
• https://www.pexels.com/search/buy/
• https://www.shotshop.com/
• https://depositphotos.com/

I purchased images from https://www.istockphoto.com/. You can even turn it into a business and sell your own images on those sites.

 

How to Optimize Images for Your Website

As I said, before using images you need to optimize them to avoid issues with your site’s load time.

Google gives preference to sites that take 5,6 seconds to load or even faster.

There are different ways to optimize images for your website. You can use online tools, plugins or image editors like Photoshop, Gimp.

I prefer online tools. When it comes to Photoshop or Gimp, you can either buy one of these programs or download free version from the internet.

I think using plugins or online tools is much easier and faster. You can install a plugin inside your website and all images will be optimized automatically.

Among plugins I can mention these:

 

• Short pixel image optimizer (100 images to compress per month)
• EWWW Image Optimizer (automatic compression)
• reSmush.it (automatic compression)
• Robin Image optimizer
• Imagify Image Optimizer

 

You can also use wordpress classic editor to resize and optimize your images. Inside your wp post or page click on the image you want and then click edit.

 

 

Resize the image and you will see that its size has changed which means it has been optimized.

 

 

After optimizing it became 34 kb from the original size 43 kb.

The last way to optimize images is by using online tools, such as:

 

• https://tinypng.com/
• http://www.imageoptimizer.net
• https://imagecompressor.com/
• https://compressor.io/
• https://kraken.io/
• https://imagify.io/
• https://imageoptim.com

 

I personally use https://tinypng.com/ and I’m very happy with it. It can optimize png and jpeg images only.

Just upload your images and it will optimize it in seconds. After that koi can download images separately or all images at once by clicking “Download all”.

 

The image you want to optimize must not exceed 5 MB in size.

I hope you can learn something new from my post about image optimization.

If you have any other questions leave them below and I will respond shortly.