How To Deal With Image Heavy Website Site

Pictures depict a thousand times more effective than words. It is an admirable strategy to use images on your site homepage. Images can impressively speak about your brand story and values. And you don’t need lengthy sentences to make the customer understand. High-quality visuals make your site more colorful & lifelike. They play a major role in converting higher leads.

But do you know about the drawback of adding images in your site?

The major disadvantage of having high-resolution images is slow loading speed. Because when 99% of your site design is visual graphics, the page size racks up to enormous bytes. So, it takes a longer time to load your website.

Long loading time is not favorable for your business. Because people tend to close a site if it takes more than 7 seconds to load. So, the traffic will just reach your site and bounce back, causing a drop-down in conversions.

Yes, you can solve this problem for your site without redesigning it entirely. In this article, let us discuss why images are crucial in your site. And how can you optimise the site speed with pictures in it!

Examples of some image-focused sites

Images are the best way to connect people’s minds. But they also take up much space in your site compared to text content and other buttons. The practical solution is to optimize the graphics which leads to ideal page size and speed.

Evernote homepage has a beautiful design, dominated by illustrative images. It has very less textual content or other elements.

Intercom website also uses images, doodles to explain it’s a core value.

The site of Marketo also includes real-life pictures on its the home page.

So, what we can conclude that majority of sites we see these days make heavy use of graphics.

Let us move to the drawback- Slow site

Slow site lowers your conversions

Google conducted a page speed study back in 2017. First, it found the average page size of different sites. Surprisingly, it was revealed that most of the web pages have a large weight of up to 2MB.

But the ideal size recommended is less than 500 kb!

 As a result, the page speed of these heavyweight sites was very slow. The highest load time was 10 seconds.

But in reality, your site should load in a span of 3 seconds. Then only you will save a lot of customers from bouncing back.

In fact, a 10 second loading time increases the bouncing probability by 123%.

So, let us find how can you diagnose and fix this big problem.

How to diagnose the problem?

From the research done by Google, it’s crystal clear that the majority of sites don’t have the desirable page speed. So is your website.

You can assess your site load time on mobile through Google’s Test My Site Tool. You just need to enter your site URL in the box. Then click on the arrow and start the analysis. In a few minutes, it will scan your device and present you with the metrics.

 Here you can find the page load time and the percentage of visitors you are losing due to it. It will also prescribe you some solutions to optimize the speed.

Alternatively, you can also use the desktop testing tool, called Google Page Speed Insights. Here you will get a quick fix to compress the images. It will guide you to format and optimize some graphics to gain back the ideal speed!

When your site becomes faster, more and more traffic interact with it. So, there are chances of converting more number of customers.

Compressing the images

According to Kinsta, bulky images pull down your site’s speed. But by choosing the right formatting, size, and compression, you can reverse your site speed. You should compress the pictures by 60 to 70% of their original size for maximum effect.

Don’t worry, they will look as impressive as they were original. The only change is that they would load faster.

If you have a WordPress website, you can install a free plugin called Smush Image Compression and Optimisation. It can be installed on the dashboard.

The tool allows you to smush or compress any image you upload to the website. Use the “Bulk Smush” feature to compress 50 images at a time. You can also change the plugin settings to automatic. So that anytime you upload a picture, it gets automatically compressed and resized. There is a feature that will scan your entire image library and compress the oversized images.

Let us see some tools which you can use if you have sites other than WordPress.

1. Compressor.io- A free tool. It supports 4 types of files namely PNG, JPEG, GIF, and SVG. It doesn’t alter the image quality after compressing it. Just click on the try it button, and the tool does its job. It can reduce the size of an image file up to 78%.
2. Compress JPEG –Using the tool, you can at once compress 20 images. It supports PNG, JPEG, and PDF formats. After the images are compressed, you can open them through a ZIP file. While the image gets compressed, you can compare it with the original image on the side. The tool also preserves image quality.

• TinyJPG – Here also you can compress 20 images in one go.

Conclusion

You must definitely track metrics like site speed and bounce rate. This helps you to diagnose why your website is not converting a good number of leads. The next trick is to compress the images by using the above said free tools.

Because you can’t avoid the images to enhance the site speed. Images make your site more attractive. By using compressed pictures, you are giving two shots. One, a well-designed site, and two a fast loading time. Both outcomes fascinate the visitors and boost your sales.