How do you get fast-loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

However, adding these photos to your online store can cost you. With each large photo or media files you add to the product's page it will take longer to load. Your customers, no matter how interested they might be, aren't willing to wait long for very long.

The question store owners have to answer is how do speed up image loading with a beautiful, high-resolution look? It may seem like a challenge, but there's actually quite a few simple ways to balance speedy product images and stunning images.

Let's take some insight into why web speed matters. We'll then go over the ways you can improve the loading time of your product photos while preserving their quality.

How fast your site's speed is crucial (hint that it's not only about SEO)

There are many reasons that having quick-loading product photos is just as crucial as having beautiful ones. The one that most store owners think of first involves searching engines.

There is no doubt that sites with speed will perform better when it comes to search results, but everything else being equal. Also, the higher up you rank on search results, the more organic search traffic you'll drive to your website. But SEO isn't the only reason that speed is important. Google only made speed a ranking element at the beginning so that it could prioritize User Experience (UX) on the web.

Here's what it really comes at: shoppers don't want to sit around waiting. They don't want to wait for shipments and they do not want to be waiting for responses or answers, and certainly do not wish to sit around waiting for your store to load. If you give prospective customers an unresponsive, slow product page, well, what does that say regarding their experience with you?

Also, while huge image file sizes can cause slow-loading pages which can hurt search engine optimization, these slow pages can also -- more importantly -- upset the customers. And that's why it's so crucial to find that perfect the right balance between speed and beauty.

So, with that thought in mind, let's move on to ways to reduce the size of your images smaller, while still preserving their quality.

Save images to WebP or JPEG size unless you require transparency.

Generally speaking, WebP should be the first preferred format, with JPEG being second choice, unless you need transparency for some reason. In the event that transparency is needed then you must choose transparent PNG.

Others are more expansive or more difficult to use for online compression. While you may be attracted to putting a hilarious animated GIF for the product's page but you ought to think twice before doing so. The trade-off in loading time will not be worth the short chuckle your shoppers might have.

We'll look at the size of the files in this photo of an iced tea cup on a white background when saved in some of the popular image formats. No image compression was run on this file. These are just the dimensions of the file when saving this image with a resolution of 1280x853 pixels. resolution.

You can see that the smallest file is the WebP file, with JPEG being a close second. The largest size file format is in the TIF the file type. This GIF file is almost double the size of a WebP file. If this were an animated GIF then it'd be even larger.

Images not only save at different file sizes at the highest quality, but they possess different compression abilities also. After performing optimization of image files on each of the above images in Photoshop by adjusting the settings to result with images that were similar in image quality, here are the results:

The WebP image is saved at its smallest sizewhich was by a wide margin. The JPEG has also decreased its file size considerably. The PNG didn't experience any file size savings and the reduction in file dimension of GIF was minimal. The use of LZW compression of the TIFF image saved an enormous amount of size also, however the resultant file size is more than 2.5x larger than the non-compressed WebP image.

If you've got hundreds of images on your site You can observe the advantages of compressing WebP or JPEG files would save you tons of space while keeping your loading time for images fairly rapid.

NOTE: AVIF is another image format which is believed to offer better compression than WebP. While it's got broad support but it's not as widely supported as WebP. If you use Adobe Photoshop for processing pictures, you'll need install a plugin to allow you to view AVIF files and save them to AVIF format.

Utilize image compression to produce ready for web.

The customers want photos of products which are huge, detail-oriented, and can be zoomed-in on (if you've got an option to zoom on your store, that is). Thankfully, this is easily possible with the software for image compression.

A lot of these programs have become so powerful that the untrained eye becomes not able to distinguish between compressed and uncompressed images.

Before compressing your pictures before compressing them, it is important to know what the maximum file size is at which your images will be displayed. Mobile devices typically have high-resolution displays that have higher resolution than desktops, however higher-resolution displays are becoming popular on desktops.

There is a chance that an image with a width of 500px displaying in a 500px-wide space isn't very appealing, and images with 1000px or 800px width looks better constrained to 500px when displayed on a retina desktop or smartphone display.

Play around with your image sizes to see where the best balance is for your products. In addition, if providing a zoom option to your images of products it is recommended to choose bigger images than if you used thumbnails only.

After you've determined the maximum size of your pixel will be, then you're able to proceed to convert your high-resolution product images to optimized, web-ready images.

Let's look at some of the tools you can use to create quick-loading images for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you use the latest version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your photos with optimised formats. You can use the Save as feature. Just don't forget to change the file's name, in case you save it with the same file size as the original. Additionally, you can utilize Export as or the legacy Save option for Weboption (until the time it's not supported anymore).

Each option include steps in the saving process which will allow you to adjust your settings to compress images. But, they do offer different features and features.

• Only Save As will allow you to save an WebP file.
• Only Export to and Save For Web allow you to modify the pixel size of your photo when saving. If you're making use of Save As then you'll have to resize your image to the dimensions you want it to be in Photoshop first.
• The older Save For Web option is the only one which will display an estimated loading time as well as the final file size prior to saving your image. It also allows you to adjust parameters for the animation loop on a GIF, and offer specific options for what information to include or not in your image.

Other alternatives in all of the methods will be the same -- decide whether to keep or eliminate metadata, or embed your color profile, and adjust image quality (lossy or lossless).

Are you not using Photoshop? Don't worry: you can try one of these web-based tools

Many people don't have access to Photoshop, but it shouldn't stop you from using Photoshop. There are plenty of free online tools designed to compress your photos.

Two of the top tools are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. The two tools reduce your photos to a surprisingly small dimension, while preserving the their quality.

When the tool is finished with your uploaded images, you'll be able save them, and upload them to your online store.

These tools' free versions do have some limitations regarding the number of files, and/or the maximum dimensions that are uploaded, so it may be a bit more tedious in comparison to Photoshop or the paid plan. However, it is absolutely free, and if don't have a large inventory of goods, then this might work for you.

Do you have a WordPress account ? Change the WordPress settings or test using a plugin

It is possible to not be aware that compression of images is integrated into WordPress. It compresses JPEG files to 82 percent of their original size however, this may not be enough for stores that opt for huge high-detailed, detailed photos or huge galleries.

One option you have to limit this built-in compression is to edit the WordPress functions.php file. This will allow you to either increase or reduce, if you prefer the quantity of compression automatically occurring before your photos are uploaded to your Media Library.

Do you want to take a less complicated route? You can always try an application. ShortPixel comes with its own plugin, and it works with nearly every type of file which includes Apple's HEIC format. You can insert images using your iPhone. When you sign-up for a free account you can get 100 credits each month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

While the latest Internet connections and improved capacity of hosting have speeded up the amount of time required for a shopper to load your website, there may still be connectivity issues. They can cause slow load times, especially if shoppers are located across the globe away from where your server is located.

Luckily, there's a method to speed things up for them (and it's not only for larger files, like photos of products or product photos, neither). A content delivery network (CDN) displays files stored on servers located physically close to visitors instead of on-demand content from a single location. The result is a faster shopping experience for your customers. the customers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. Visitors will also receive information via the CDN server that's closest to them. These two things can speed the loading time by a significant amount in particular for big photos as well as media file sizes.

Along with compressing, utilizing a CDN is a fantastic way to serve product photos very quickly, especially if you don't update your shop on a regular basis. And of course, if you need to update your store in a hurry, you can turn on the CDN off.

There are other methods you can balance fast and fantastic

The ideas offered above are the largest, and most significant things you could achieve a good balance with photos of your products that look good and load quickly. But here are a few additional tips to bear in the back of your mind:

• Select background that is white. Generally speaking, the fewer colors an image contains more colors, the less size is. This is especially applicable when compression comes into play and the palette is further reduced.
• Remove unnecessary images of your product. Do you have photos of the shoes you're selling from ten different perspectives? Then you can reduce the number to five angles and cut your load time by half.
• load thumbnails first, and only bring up full-size images when clicked. So, shoppers don't have to have to wait for bigger images.
• lazy load of images. Lazy loading images improves page speed by only loading images over the fold and loading other images when users scroll to where they're on the page. The Jetpack plugin not only offers CDN capabilities, but it also offers lazy loading of images. Jetpack is also a host of other WordPress optimizers that, though not directly connected to images, could improve performance and improve the user experience.
• Eliminate irrelevant metadata. Depending on the purpose of your image file, it could have a large amount of metadata like copyright information Keywords tags, geographical data such as descriptions of images, and so on. In certain situations, you may want to preserve this data, but you may also be able to save the space in your files by not storing it in the process of compressing your images.

Beautiful product images shouldn't be required to slow your website (or your shoppers)

There's a chance that the only way to have gorgeous product photos is to settle for slow loading stores, or that the only way to speed up loading pages is to go with tiny pictures that are extremely compressed. But we beg to differ.

By making a couple of adjustments to your photos of products, you can find the perfect balance between fast-loading and gorgeous-looking. Your site - or your customers should slow down.