How to Get Fast-Loading, Amazing-looking product photos

However, adding these photos to your online store could be costly. Each time a large picture or media files you add to a product page loading time is increased. Customers regardless of how engaged they might be, aren't willing to wait long for long.

Store owners often have to answer is What can I do to accelerate image loading speed with a beautiful, high-resolution look? It may seem like a difficult task, however there's actually quite couple of simple methods to ensure that you balance fast product photos and fantastic image quality.

Let's take a look at why site speed matters. In the next section, we'll discuss some tips for how you can reduce the load duration of your images while preserving their quality.

The speed of your website is important (hint this: it's more than just about SEO)

There are a few reasons why having fast-loading images of products is equally important as having attractive ones. One of the reasons that store owners think of first concerns searching engines.

There is no doubt that sites with speed are more effective on search engine results, with all other things considered equal. And the higher up your rank in the searches, the more organic traffic from search engines you'll bring to your site. But SEO isn't the only reason why speed is important. Google only made speed a ranking element in the first place in order to give priority to User Experience (UX) on the web.

Let's see what it all comes at: shoppers don't want to sit around waiting. They don't want to be waiting for shipments and they do not want to sit around waiting for answers or answers, and certainly do not want to wait for your site to load. So if you offer a potential customer the slow and sluggish website what do you think that says about their overall experience with you?

Also, while huge image file sizes can cause slow-loading pages that potentially affect your SEO, these slow pages may also irritate your customers. importantly -- upset the people who visit your site. And that's why it's so vital to find the right balance between fast and beautiful.

In this way Let's look into ways to make your image files smaller but still retain their high-quality.

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

The general consensus is that WebP should be your first option, and JPEG as a second option, unless you need transparency due to a reason. In the event that transparent is necessary then you must choose a transparent PNG.

Others are more expansive or more difficult to use for online compression. If you're attracted to putting an hilarious animated GIF for your product page but you ought to think twice before doing so. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. will not be worth the short chuckle that your customers might experience.

We'll glance at the sizes of files for this image of the cup of tea set against white background, when it is saved in some of the more popular formats for images. No image compression was run in this image. This is just the dimensions of the file that were saved when the image was in 1280x853 pixels, at the full resolution.

As you can see, the smallest size file is WebP file with JPEG in a close third. The biggest size of file is in the TIF files format. It is estimated that the GIF file is almost twice the size of a WebP file. If this was an animated GIF then it'd be larger.

Not only do images save at different file sizes at their best quality, but they possess distinct compression capabilities also. After running image file optimization for each of these image files in Photoshop by adjusting the settings to result in images of similar visual quality, these were the results:

The WebP image is saved at the smallest file size -- and by a very wide distance. The JPEG also reduced the size of its files by a significant amount. The PNG did not have any savings in file size and the reduction in file dimension of GIF was not significant. Using LZW compression for the TIFF image, it saved a significant amount of size however, the final file is still over 2.5x bigger than the original non-compressed WebP file.

If you're a website owner with thousands of files on your website, you can see how compressing WebP or JPEG files would save you lots of space and keep your loading time for images fairly quick.

Note: AVIF is another image format which is believed to offer better compression than WebP. While it's got wide support, it's still not as well-supported as WebP. If you use Adobe Photoshop to process images, you'll need to install a plugin to allow you to view AVIF files, and then save them to AVIF format.

Use image compression to create web-ready images

The customers want photos of products which are big, high precise, and are able to be zoomed into (if you have an option to zoom on your site, that's). This is, thankfully, achievable by using images compression software.

Some of these apps are so effective that an untrained eyesight is in awe of the distinction between compressed and uncompressed images.

Before compressing your images, you'll want to determine what the maximum file size will be at the point where your photos will appear. Mobile phones typically use larger resolution screens with higher pixels per inch than desktop computers, although HD displays are increasingly popular on desktops.

There is a chance that an image with a width of 500px displaying in a 500px-wide space does not look very good. Likewise, images with 1000px or 800px width appears better when it is limited to 500px on an iPhone or a retina-based desktop display.

Play around with your image sizes to find out what you can find the most balance for your products. Additionally, if you are using a zoom function for your product images it is recommended to choose larger images than if you used thumbnails only.

After you've determined which your max pixel size are, you'll be able to begin to transform your high-resolution product images to optimized, web-ready images.

Let's take a look at some of the programs that you can employ to make high-speed loading product images for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you are using every version Adobe Photoshop, there are a few different ways to save your images in optimized formats. You can use the Save As feature, just be sure to modify the name of your file if you are saving it with the same file format that the original file. Additionally, you can use Export to as well as the older Save for Weboption (until it's not supported anymore).

Each option will have steps during the saving process which will allow you to adjust the settings for compression of your images. However, each option does come with different options and capabilities.

• Only Save as will allow you to save an WebP file.
• Only Export to and Save for Web let you alter the dimensions of your photo in the process of saving. If you are using Save As, you'll need change the size of your image in Photoshop. the size you'd like it to be to be in Photoshop before saving it.
• The old Save for Web option is the only one which can provide you with the approximate time to load and final file size prior to saving your image. It also allows users to alter the your animation loop's settings for a GIF, and offer the option to choose what metadata to keep or omit from your image.

Other alternatives in all of the methods are the same -- select whether to retain or omit metadata, embed the color profile of your choice, and adjust image quality (lossy or lossless).

No Photoshop? No problem: try one of these web-based tools

There aren't many people who have access to Photoshop however this shouldn't be a reason to put you off. There are many web-based tools for free that are designed to make your photos smaller.

Two of the top tools are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. Both tools shrink your images to an astonishingly small dimension, while preserving the high-quality images.

After the software is done with your uploaded images, you'll be able to save them, and upload them to your online store.

These programs' free versions come with some restrictions in terms of number of files and/or maximum file size that they can upload as well, which means it's a bit more tedious of a process than using Photoshop or the paid versions. But it is cost-free and if you do not have a huge store with hundreds of products and/or products, this could work for you.

Are you using a plugin ? Edit the WordPress settings, or use using a plugin

There's a chance that you don't know that compressing images is an option included in WordPress. This compression shrinks your JPEGs to 82 percent of their original size However, that may not be enough for stores who prefer huge, highly-detailed photos or large galleries.

Another option to control this built-in compression is to edit the WordPress functions.php file. It will let you enhance -- or even decrease or decrease, depending on your preference -- the amount of automatic compression that occurs prior to your images hitting the Media Library.

Are you looking for a simpler route? You can always try using a plugin. ShortPixel has their own plugin, and it works with almost every file format including Apple's HEIC format, so you are able to add images directly using your iPhone. When you sign-up for a free account you will receive 100 credits every month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though new Internet connectivity and better hosting capabilities have sped up the amount of time required for customers to visit your website, there may remain connectivity issues. They can cause slow time to load, especially when shoppers are located across the globe away from where your server is situated.

Luckily, there's a method to speed things up for these files (and this isn't just limited to larger files, like photos of products also). A Content delivery network (CDN) displays stored content from servers physically close to visitors instead of on-demand content that is delivered from one location. This speeds up the browsing experience for everyone the customers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. Your visitors will also get information from the CDN server closest to them. Both of these things speed up load time dramatically, especially for large photos as well as media files.

Together with compression, utilizing a CDN can be a great option to deliver product images extremely swiftly and efficiently, particularly if you don't update your shop on a regular schedule. And of course, if you need to update your store in a hurry it is possible to shut off your CDN off.

A few other ways to achieve balance that is fast and fantastic

The suggestions above are the biggest, most meaningful things you can achieve a good balance between product photos that look good and load quickly. But here are a few more tips to keep on your the back of your mind:

• Select background that is white. Generally speaking, the fewer colors an image contains and the fewer colors it has, the smaller its file size will be. This is even more applicable when compression comes into action and the palette gets smaller.
• Get rid of unnecessary photos of products. Do you have photographs of the shoes you're selling at ten different perspectives? You can probably reduce it to five, and cut down the loading time in half.
• Load thumbnails first then only display full-size images when clicked. Then, customers will be able to be waited for larger photos.
• Images that load slowly. Lazy loading images speeds up page loading by loading images that are above the fold, and also loading additional images once users scroll where they are on the page. The Jetpack plugin is not just a CDN capabilities, but it also offers lazy loading for images. Jetpack also has other WordPress optimizers which, although not directly connected to images, could improve efficiency and boost user experience.
• Eliminate irrelevant metadata. Depending on the purpose of your image files, you could have a large amount of information about metadata such as copyright keywords, tags, geographic data images, descriptions of the image, etc. In some cases you might want to save this information however, you could also free some space by eliminating the metadata when compressing your photos.

Incredible product photos don't need to cause slowdowns on your website (or your shoppers)

The only method to create stunning images of your products is to settle for a sluggish store, or that the only way to get quick-loading product pages is to go with tiny, highly-compressed photos. We disagree.

By making a couple of improvements to the photos you sell, you can find the ideal balance between speedy loading and fantastic-looking. Your site - or your customers should slow down.