Did you know that your photos can slow down your website?

The world moves fast. Really fast. Consumers what information and they want it now. According to Google, if your website hasn’t loaded in 3 seconds, the viewer has already lost interest. Your photos can be a big contributing factor to website slow down.

If you don’t know us personally, you might not know that we had a digital marketing agency for 15 years and helped businesses all over the United States with their website, online advertising, social media, etc. We’ve helped many with this issue and want to make sure your business doesn’t have the same ones.

Here are our top tips to help make sure your photos are best optimized for your website:

How big are your photos?

This one should be an obvious one, but you would be surprised how many people – especially photographers – load these giant images onto their site. It will slow your load times down dramatically. A good rule of thumb is to keep your image file size below 150KB, nothing above 1920px in width, use a 72dpi quality level.

Where are the photos stored?

Anytime you’re pulling in photos from a 3rd party site, your site is having to contact that platform to pull the images into your site. For instance, if you store your pictures on Flickr or are pulling a feed from Instagram, it can cause that load time to slow down just a bit. And…with 3 seconds as the recommended max load time … every second counts. Try to store your files natively on your website whenever possible.

Pro Tip:

Make sure to check your images on your smartphone too. Improperly placed and / or configured photos, can mess up the mobile settings causing images to get cropped, be placed incorrectly, or cause the viewer to have to scroll around to see the whole image.

Have questions on optimizing your images for your website? Just let us know. We’d be happy to help!

Check out our past blog posts