Images are vital to the worldwide web. They visualize data, break up long paragraphs of text and help users have a superb online experience. This is especially useful when you run an online store. However, having high-quality images can affect your website's performance.
High-resolution images are large and can affect you're the load time of your website. A slow-loading website causes poor site performance, which affects your user's experience and can hurt your conversions and sales. A great way to improve your website's load time is by optimizing your images for the web.
This blog covers what image optimization is and how you can optimize your images to improve user experience, increase conversion rates and sales. Read on to learn how.
Image optimization refers to the process of reducing the file size of your images to the smallest possible file size without affecting the image quality. Optimized images help your website rank better on search engines like Google, improves your website's speed, and boost overall conversion rates for leads and sales.
Remember, the key to successful image optimization is finding the perfect balance between acceptable image quality and the smallest file size. Three essential factors to consider when optimizing images are:
Although there are several image file formats, the most common formats with website owners are PNG, JPEG, and GIF. PNG files are uncompressed and have a higher quality image, and JPEG is compressed, has smaller image sizes, and reduces image quality slightly. GIF file format is great for animated pictures and uses 256 colors along with lossless compression.
When you upload a picture either from your camera or phone, it usually has a high resolution and large file dimensions. Large files are best suited for printing but not websites. To reduce your image's size, you can resize it using image editing software.
Image compression is essential for image optimization. There are several levels and types of image compression, each setting depending on the compression program you use. There are two main types of compression; lossy and lossless.
Lossy compression permanently eliminates unnoticeable data, while lossless compression doesn't eliminate any data, meaning the picture quality remains the same. Common lossless image formats include GIF, PNG, and TIFF. Examples of lossy compression image file formats include MPEG and JPEG.
A huge mistake most website owners make is uploading images to their website without optimizing them first. This results in slower load times and affects user experience, which can hurt your business's bottom line. To optimize your images, you can use CorelDRAW to minimize file size while maintaining high-quality images. Follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Download CorelDRAW from the official website and install it on your PC. Ensure you download a compatible format.
Step 2: Launch CorelDRAW; then, from the main menu, select File> Open and select the image you want to optimize.
Step 3: Resize the image dimensions and resolution. From the menu, select image> Scale Image. Here, you can change the width, height, and resolution of your image.
Step 4: After adjusting the image's resolution and dimensions, you will need to compress the file size. From the menu, select File> Export. From the dialog box, choose a file name, file type, and click "Export" in the bottom right.
Step 5: Once you export the file, a quality slider window pops up. To help you select the best quality, first play with the settings to strike a balance between the file size and image quality. After you get a balance, click on "Save" and select a folder on your PC where you want to save your already optimized image.
Visuals are great at boosting your SEO rankings. However, uploading high-quality photos can negatively affect your site's speed and performance, negatively impacting the user experience and conversion rates.
By optimizing your images with CorelDRAW, you will upload high-quality photos without affecting your website's performance. Download a free trial of CorelDRAW today and get started on image optimization for your web images.
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