One of the services we provide is a web presence and marketing audit. During an audit we take a look at your website, social media and email marketing to see how you are doing compared to best practices.
Are Your Images Slowing Down Your Website?
One factor we evaluate is the speed of your website. Poor performing websites don’t rank well in Google, and Google knows users don’t want to wait for a site to load. Google wants to see sites load in a few seconds or less. One of the most common problems we see during our audits is images that are not optimized, slowing down performance.
Poor performing websites don’t rank well in Google. Your images could be the problem.
It’s best to use your own photos rather than stock photos, but one problem you’ll face is phone cameras are such high quality that uploading these large size images without reducing the file size first, can slow down your website’s load time. You’ll want to know the optimal size and format of images for your website and then crop and resize the pictures before you post them.
Large images can cause slow load times, while too small images may get stretched and blurry.
Ideal Crop and Sizes Vary Across Platforms
Optimized photos are key. Consistent sized images also make your website look more professional and attractive. In WordPress for example, uploading your image will create a number of sizes for you, but if the one you start with is not in the correct format or size, they may crop awkwardly, like cutting off people’s heads for example, or they may not be large enough which will result in blurry images.
Using the right size and crop is ideal for performance and professional appearance.
This is also true for your social media and email marketing. When images get cut off, crop weirdly, or are uneven when two photos are side-by-side, it’s going to make your post or email look bad. The size and cropping of the photos are just as important here, not just on your website.
Quick Crop and Resize Hacks
You’re probably thinking that you’re not a graphics person and don’t have the tools to do this, but you really do. Your smartphone takes amazing pictures and videos, and your phone and desktop computer have built-in tools to edit photos as well.
What you’ll want to do is crop your images to an attractive composition, then resize them for a pixel size appropriate for your website or social media. We use 1600 x 800 for our website because of the sizes WordPress makes for us, but your site may be different. Instagram images work best as a square at 1080 x 1080 pixels, and LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook posts are 1200 x 630 pixels.
We’ve put together a very simple how-to-video for you on cropping and resizing images using tools that are already built into your operating system. And, we’ve also linked to some apps to do this on your phone as well.
