Optimizing images for your website is crucial for both user experience and SEO. Large, unoptimized images can slow down your site’s loading speed, frustrating visitors and negatively impacting your Google ranking. Fortunately, with a few simple steps, you can ensure your images are high-quality while keeping your website fast and efficient. Compressing your images can save space on your website!

Why Optimizing Images Matters

1. Improved Load Speed

Large image files can significantly slow down your website. Slow-loading sites lead to poor user experiences, higher bounce rates, and lower conversion rates. Optimizing images reduces the file size, helping your site load faster and keep visitors engaged.

2. Better SEO

Google takes page load time into account when ranking websites. If your site takes too long to load, it can hurt your SEO and push you lower in search results. By optimizing your images, you’ll improve your site speed, which can lead to higher search engine rankings.

3. Enhanced Mobile Experience

Mobile users are especially impacted by slow-loading websites. Optimized images ensure that your site looks great and functions well across all devices, providing a seamless experience for mobile visitors.

Steps to Optimize Your Website Images

Now that we’ve covered why this is important, let’s look at the process of optimizing your images for your website.

1. Start by Downloading Your Image

First, choose the image you want to use and download it to your computer. Whether it’s a background image, product photo, or hero image, it’s important to start with the highest quality version of the image before resizing and compressing.

2. Adjust Image Size

If you’re using a Mac, the Preview app makes it easy to resize your images:

Open the image in Preview.
Click on “Tools” in the menu, then select “Adjust Size.”
For background images, set the width to 2500 pixels. For other images, you can go smaller depending on the space you’re filling.
Set the resolution to 72 pixels per inch (ppi), which is standard for web images.
Save the resized image.

This step ensures that your image isn’t too large, which can slow down load times, while still maintaining high visual quality.

A screenshot of how to change image dimensions.

3. Use a Compression Tool

After resizing, the next step is to compress the image further to reduce the file size without compromising on quality. We recommend using an online tool like compressor.io.

Drag and drop your image into the compressor.
The tool will reduce the file size while preserving image quality.
Download the compressed image and save it for use on your website.

Ideally, each page on your website should be under 1MB in total image size, with no page ever being larger than 5MB. Keeping file sizes small will help maintain fast load times.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your website images is an essential step for improving both the performance and SEO of your site. By reducing file sizes and maintaining high image quality, you’ll ensure your site loads quickly, ranks higher in search engines, and delivers a better user experience.

For a full walkthrough on how to resize and compress your images, check out our video tutorial from our web designer. You'll learn exactly how to optimize your images in just a few minutes!

How to Optimize Images for Your Website: A Step-by-Step Guide