Highlights:

• Large images will use more bandwidth, and small images will affect user experience on your site.
• Small images will create a bad impression on your business.
• Image size should align with the display size of your site.
• You can use free easy-to-use image compression tools such as Shutterstock Editor, Tiny PNG, and Compressor.io.

In real-time, everything from the title tags, meta description, and image size affects the performance of your website.

Why is Image Size so Important?

Remember page speed? A measure of time it takes for the browser to display content on your page that influences user experience and better Google ranking – image size affects this greatly!

Like Title Tags and Meta descriptions, having the proper image size is key to optimizing your website pages for faster load time. But sadly, only a few website designers know this trick. In fact, Google reports that most of our sites don’t load fast enough. Having too large images obviously frustrates search engine tools, including Google when optimizing your site.

Not only will large images slow down the loading time on your website, but you also force your users’ browsers to resize them. Ultimately, it can reflect a lack of expertise and create a bad impression on your business – may cause you to lose potential customers to your competitors.

While you’re ensuring that the photos are not too large, it’s important to also ensure that they are not too small. Large images will use more bandwidth, and small images will affect the user experience on your site.

But what then – how can you have your website fit for your business and how do you scale the images?

How to Resize Your Images

Put in mind that the browser loads and displays the entire content on a page. Below are ways to resize your images:

1. Pick the Right File Format

By now, you know the popular accepted file formats for the web – JPEG, PNG, and GIF.

JPEG fits well for photos, screenshots, and most other higher resolution images. With JPEG, you can resize and tweak the image quality, and get a perfectly optimized quality when compared with the original.

PNG works perfectly for images with geometrical shapes. PNG format gives you the flex of compressing the size of the image without losing out on the quality. But note that images with PNG format have larger sizes than other formats.

GIFs are perfect for anything animation. Note that gifs are not to be used for still images, as it will limit the number of colors that can be applied to the image.

2. Reduce the Number of Pixels

Usually, the file size of an image is proportional to the pixel of the image. In other words, the fewer the pixels of the image, the smaller the bytes of the image size, and vice versa.

The maximum width of your image will depend on the maximum pixel size on your website. CMS (Content Management Systems) makes this simple and with ease. WordPress, for example, provides you the option of resizing an image immediately you upload it to your website or blog. However, it’s still your duty to select the best fit.

We are not saying you must keep the image sizes to 100 x 100 pixels. NO! We only recommend that image size should align with the display size of your site.

Concluding Remarks

Let’s wrap with some easy-to-use image compression tools.

Instead of depending on your CMS to resize your images, you can leverage some easy-to-use image compression tools such as Shutterstock Editor, Tiny PNG, and Compressor.io. Fortunately, most of them are free to use.

You will find these tools handy, especially if you don’t have knowledge of graphics or are not too good.

Shutterstock Editor, for example, gives you the platform to create designs for marketing materials, and more. Simple to use – upload your image or download from Shutterstock collection, and begin your edit. Click done to save the resized image. Then, it’s all over.