How To Get Quick-Loading amazing-looking photos of your products

Apr 22, 2023

But, incorporating these images on your store's website isn't cheap. When you add a big image or media file you upload to the load time increases. Customers regardless of how engaged they may be will not wait all to be waiting.

Store owners frequently have to determine what can they do to accelerate image loading speed with stunning, high-resolution images? This might seem like an impossible task, but there's actually quite couple of easy ways to make sure that your store has fast images of products and fantastic image quality.

Let's take a review of why speed is important. In the next section we'll look at some ideas to help you reduce the load duration of your photos, while also preserving the quality of your images.

Speed of your site is important (hint this: it's more than just about SEO)

There are a few reasons for why loading images quickly of the products is just as crucial in the same way as having appealing images. One of the reasons that store owners think of first involves search engines.

It is no secret that websites with speed are more effective on the results of search engines, with all other aspects being equally. And the higher up your position in search results and the higher your organic traffic from search engines that you'll attract to your website. But SEO isn't the sole reason speed is important. Google only made speed an element of ranking in the first place so that it could give more weight to user Experience (UX) across the internet.

Let's take a look at where it all comes at: shoppers don't want to sit around waiting. They don't want to be waiting around for deliveries and don't want to be sitting around waiting for answers or responses, and definitely aren't willing to wait for your website to load. So if you offer your potential customers a slow and sluggish website how do you feel it will say about their overall experience when dealing with your company?

man sitting with arms crossed

Additionally, large image file sizes can cause slow-loading pages that potentially affect your SEO, these slow pages may also irritate the customers who visit your site. In particular, it could upset people who visit your site. It's important to strike the perfect combination of speed and elegance that doesn't.

So, we'll explore ways of making the size of your images smaller, but still retain their high-quality.

Save your images in WebP as well as JPEG formats, unless you need transparency.

There is a consensus that WebP should be your first choice, with JPEG as an alternative in the event that you require transparency for a specific reason. If transparency is necessary then you must select an image that is transparent.

Others are more expansive or are more challenging to utilize for online compression. If you're tempted to put an amusing animated GIF onto your product page but it's best to consider the consequences prior to doing it. This is a compromise to speed the loading process. This isn't more than the brief chuckle your customers may experience.

The size of the files in this photo of a cup of tea placed against a white background when it is saved in some of the more popular formats for pictures. The image was not compressed on this photo. This is just what the dimensions of the file which were recorded when the image was in 1280x853 pixels. This is the maximum resolution.

white cup of tea on a platter
image sizes listed for GIF, JPG, PNG, TIF, and WEBP

As you can see, the smallest size file is WebP files and JPEG as a close third. The largest size file is the TIF file format. The GIF file is nearly twice larger than the WebP file. If it was an animated GIF then it would be larger.

Not only do images save at different file sizes at their best quality, however, they have distinct compression capabilities also. After running optimization of image files on each of these files within Photoshop by adjusting the settings so that they produce images of similar visual quality, here are the outcomes:

image sizes after compression

It is believed that the WebP image is stored at the size of the file with the least amount of dataas well as by a large distance. The JPEG also reduced the dimensions of the files by a significant amount. It is worth noting that the PNG was not able to offer savings in file size and the diminution in dimension of GIF is not substantial. Utilizing LZW compression for the TIFF image, it saved a substantial amount of space however, the final file size is more than 2.5x larger than the initial compressed WebP file.

If you're a website owner who has thousands of images that are on your website it is possible to see the benefits of the compression process of WebP or JPEG files can help you save plenty of space, and make your loading time for images fairly quick.

Notice: AVIF is another image format believed to have better compression capabilities as compared to WebP. Although it's supported by a wide range of people but it's not as widely supported in the same way as WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to process images, you'll need to install a plugin which allows users to see AVIF files, and then save them to AVIF format.

Make use of image compression for web-ready images

Customers want images of their products that are large, high precise, and can be zoomed into (if you have an option for zooming on your site, that's). It is achievable by using the software for compressing images.

A few of these apps have such a high efficiency that unskilled eye is amazed by the difference between uncompressed and compressed images.

photographer taking a picture with a camera

Before compressing your images You'll need to figure out what your maximum size of the file is where your photos will appear. Mobile phones usually have larger resolution screens with higher resolution than desktops, however HD display screens are becoming more popular on desktops.

There's a possibility that an image with 500 pixels of width displayed within a space of 500px does not look great. Likewise, images with 1000px or 800px width appears superior when confined to 500px when displayed on the iPhone or retina-based desktop display.
    Explore your images dimensions to see if you can find the most balanced for your product. Also, if you're employing a zoom feature for the images of your products, it's suggested to pick larger pictures than if you used thumbnails as the only option.

Once you've established what your maximum pixels will be, you'll then be able change your high-resolution images of products to optimized, web-ready images.

We'll take a look several of the applications could be used to produce high-speed loading product images for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using the latest version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your photos with format that is optimized for. You can use the Save to feature, just be certain to change the name of your file in case you save using the exact file format that the original file. You can also use Export for and from the old Save feature for Weboption (until it isn't currently supported).

Photoshop compression settings

Each option will have an action to take during the saving process which will allow you to adjust the settings for compression of your images. However, each option does have different choices and features.

  • Simply Saving as can allow you to save a WebP file.
  • The only two options, Export to and Save for Web permit you to change the dimensions of your photos when saving. If you're using Save as it is necessary to alter the size of your image within Photoshop. the size you'd like it to be to be within Photoshop before saving it.
  • The previous Save for Web alternative is the only one which provides you with an estimated time for loading as well as the final size of your file prior to saving your photo. It also allows users to alter the your animation loop's settings for a GIF in addition to giving you the possibility of choosing the metadata that you would like to preserve or omit from your image.

Alternatives to all these methods follow the same principles -- select whether to retain or omit metadata, and embed the color profile of your choice, and adjust image quality (lossy as well as lossless).

Are you not using Photoshop? No problem: try one of these online tools

It's not a lot of people that are able to access Photoshop but this shouldn't be a reason to keep you from using it. There are many internet-based applications for free which help to make the photos you take smaller.

Two of the most effective instruments are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. These tools can shrink images to a stunningly tiny size and preserve the quality of your images.

compression tool in action

Once the program is finished with the uploaded photos, you'll be able save them and then add the images to your online store.

The free versions of these programs come with some restrictions in terms of number of files or maximum size that can be uploaded and download, so that it's more difficult of a process than using Photoshop or paid versions. It is free and, if you don't have a massive store with hundreds of products and/or products, this could work for you.

Are you using any plugins ? Change the WordPress settings or plugins

It's possible that you're unaware the fact that compression of images can be an option included in WordPress. The compression reduces the size of your JPEGs by 82 percent their original size However, it may not be sufficient to satisfy stores that prefer large images with high resolution or massive galleries.

Another method to limit this compression built into WordPress is to edit your WordPress functions.php file. It will let you enhance -- or even decrease or reduce, based on your preference -- the extent of the automatic compression that occurs before your photos are uploaded to your Media Library.

Do you need an easier way to get there? Try using the plugin. ShortPixel comes with its own plugin and can work with virtually every file format, including Apple's HEIC format, so it is possible to upload photos directly from the iPhone. When you sign-up to a free account, you'll get 100 credits per month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though new Internet connectivity as well as better hosting options have increased the amount of time required for visitors to access your website, there may still be issues with connectivity. These issues can lead to slow times to load, especially when shoppers are located in different countries from the location where your server is located.

There's an option to make things faster for the files (and this isn't just limited to large files like photographs of items too). A Content delivery network (CDN) displays stored content from servers that are physically near to the users instead of on-demand content that is delivered from one location. The result is a faster user experience everyone users.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. The visitors also will receive details via the CDN nearest to their. Both of these things increase the speed of loading particularly for photos with large sizes along with media documents.

Together with compression, utilizing the CDN can be a great solution to display product pictures quickly and efficiently, particularly when you aren't updating your shop regularly. Also, in the event that you need to update your store in a hurry it is possible to shut off your CDN completely.

There are other methods you can use to get balance, which is super fast and easy

The tips above are among the most important things you can do to achieve a good balance between product photos that look good and load speedily. But here are a few more tips to keep on your mind's back brain:

  • Choose a background that's white. Generally speaking, the fewer images that contain colors and the less hues it contains to work with, the lower the size of its files will be. This is especially true as compression is activated as the palette becomes smaller.
  • Remove unneeded images of the products. Do you have photographs of the shoes you're selling at ten different perspectives? It's possible to reduce this to five, and reduce the time to load in half.
  • Start loading thumbnails, and then only display full-size images when you click. Customers will then be able to be waited for larger photos.
  • images that are loaded slowly. Lazy loading images accelerates page loading by loading images above the fold, and loading other images when users scroll to where they are on the page. The Jetpack plugin does not only provide an application with CDN capability, it can also provide lazy loading of images. Jetpack is also equipped with other WordPress optimization tools that, though not directly tied to images, may increase efficiency and improve the user experience.
  • Eliminate unnecessary metadata. Depending on the purpose of your image files, you could have a large amount of information regarding metadata, such as copiesright keywords, tags geographic data images, descriptions of the image, etc. There are times when you prefer to keep this data but you can save some area by getting rid of metadata in compressing the photos.

Incredible product photos don't need to cause slowdowns on your website (or the customers you serve)

The only way to make stunning images of your products is to settle for a sluggish store, or the best way to get quick-loading product pages is to use small, high-quality images. We disagree.

With few improvements to the photos your site sells, you'll be able to find the ideal combination of speedy loading and stunning-looking. Your website - and your customers should slow down.

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