How to Get Fast-Loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

However, adding these photos to your online store could be costly. With each large photo or media file you add to the product's page it will take longer to load. Your customers, no matter how interested they are, aren't willing to sit for for long.

Store owners often are faced with is how do speed up image loading while retaining a high-resolution appearance? It may seem like a difficult task, however there's actually quite number of ways that can be used to achieve fast product photos and fantastic image quality.

First, let's have a look at why site speed matters. Then, we'll go over some suggestions on how you can decrease the load time of your photos while preserving their quality.

The speed of your website is important (hint that it's not only about SEO)

There are many reasons why having fast-loading photographs of your products is as important as having attractive ones. The reason that many store owners think of first concerns the search engine.

The truth is that websites with faster speeds have better performance when it comes to search results, but all other things considered equal. And the higher up you are in search results, the more organic traffic that you can drive towards your website. But SEO isn't the only reason that speed is crucial. Google only made speed a ranking factor at the beginning in order to give priority to User Experience (UX) on the web.

Let's see what it all comes in the end: shoppers don't want to wait. They don't want to wait for shipments They don't wish to wait for answers They certainly don't need to wait around for your website to load. If you give your potential customers the slow and sluggish website what do you think that says about their overall interaction with you?

So while large image files can slow down loading pages that potentially hurt your SEO, these slow pages could also -- and more importantly -- upset the customers. This is why it's crucial to find that perfect balance between fast and beautiful.

So, with that thought in mind we can now look at ways to make your photo files smaller but still retain their high-quality.

Keep images saved in WebP or JPEG format unless you need transparency

In general, WebP should be your first option, and JPEG as second best, unless you need transparency due to a reason. If transparency is needed then you must choose a transparent PNG.

Some formats are bigger or less convenient for online compression. And while you might be inclined to put an humorous animated GIF on your website's product pages, you should probably reconsider. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. isn't worth the brief chuckle the customers may experience.

We'll look at the file sizes for this image of an iced tea cup on white background, when it is stored in the most common image formats. The image was not compressed on this file. These are the only size of the files when saving this image in 1280x853 pixels, at the full resolution.

As you can see, the smallest file is the WebP file, with JPEG being a close second. The biggest size of file is the TIF files format. This GIF file is nearly twice as large as the WebP file. If it were an animated GIF, it would be even larger.

The images are not just saved in different sizes and at the highest quality, but they have different compression abilities and compression capabilities. After running image file optimization for each of these image files in Photoshop using settings that resulted in images of similar to their visual quality, the following were the outcomes:

The WebP image is saved at the smallest file size -in a wide distance. The JPEG has also decreased the size of its files by a significant amount. Its PNG did not see any reduction in size as the decrease in the file dimension of GIF was minimal. Utilizing LZW compression of the TIFF image, it saved a significant quantity of the file's size as however, the final image is over 2.5x bigger than an uncompressed WebP file.

If you're a website owner with hundreds of images on your site, you can see how compressing WebP or JPEG images can save tons of space while keeping the loading times of your images relatively rapid.

Note: AVIF is another image format which is believed to offer better compression than WebP. While it's got broad support however, it's not as popular as WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to process pictures, you'll need install a plug-in to allow you to view AVIF images and store them in AVIF format.

Make use of image compression for Web-friendly images

Shoppers want product photos which are big, high detailed, and able to be zoomed-in on (if you've got the zoom feature enabled in your site, that's). This is, thankfully, achievable by using images compression software.

Some of these apps have become so powerful that the untrained eye becomes incapable of spotting the difference between compressed and uncompressed images.

Prior to compressing your photos You'll need to figure out the size that is at which your images will appear. Mobile phones typically use high-resolution displays that have higher pixels per inch than desktop computers, although higher-resolution displays are becoming common on desktop.

There is a chance that a wide 500px image displaying in a 500px-wide space does not look very good. Likewise, a 800px or 1000px-wide image is better suited to 500px for a retina desktop or smartphone display.

Explore your images sizes to find out what the best balance is to fit your product. In addition, if providing a zoom option to your images of products it is recommended to choose more large images than you would if were only using thumbnails.

Once you've decided what your maximum pixel dimensions are, you'll be able to proceed to convert your high-resolution product images to web-ready, optimized images.

We'll take a look some of the software that you can employ to make fast-loading product photos for your site.

Adobe Photoshop

If you're using the latest version Adobe Photoshop, there are various ways to save your photos in optimized formats. It is possible to use the Save As feature. Just make sure to alter the name of your file if you are saving it in the same file format that the original file. You can also utilize Export as or the legacy Save feature for Weboption (until it's no longer supported).

Each of these options includes steps within the process of saving that allow you to adjust your settings to compress images. Each option will offer different features and capabilities.

• Only Save As allows you to save the WebP file.
• Only Export to and Save For Web allow you to alter the dimensions of your image when saving. If you are making use of Save As, you'll need to resize your image to what you'd like in Photoshop first.
• The old Save For Web feature is the only choice which can provide you with the approximate time to load and the size of the file after saving your image. It also allows you to change the parameters for the animation loop on an GIF and provide you with the option to choose what metadata you can include in the file.

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

Do you have no Photoshop? No problem: try one of these web-based tools

There aren't many people who have access to Photoshop However, it shouldn't stop you from using Photoshop. There are a lot of web-based tools for free that are designed to make your photos smaller.

Two of the top are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. These tools can shrink images to an astonishingly small dimension, while preserving the their quality.

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

Both of these applications' free versions have some limitations with regards to the amount of files, and/or the maximum dimensions that are uploaded and therefore it could be a bit more tedious and time-consuming than Photoshop or the paid versions. However, it is cost-free and if you don't have an online catalog of hundreds of items it could be a great fit.

Do you have a WordPress account ? Modify the WordPress settings, or use the plugin

It is possible to not know that image compression is integrated into WordPress. The compression reduces the size of your JPEGs to 82% of their original size however, this may not be enough for sites that opt for huge high-detailed, detailed photos or huge galleries.

The best way to control this built-in compression is to edit WordPress's functions.php file. This will allow you to either increase or reduce or decrease, depending on your preference -- the amount of automatic compression which occurs prior to the images being uploaded into your Media Library.

Are you looking for a simpler way? Try an application. ShortPixel comes with its own version that works for just about any file type which includes Apple's HEIC format. You can upload images straight via 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

Although new Internet connections and improved capacity of hosting have speeded up the time it takes for shoppers to access your site, there could still be connectivity issues. These can slow down site load times, especially if your customer is located around distance away from where your server is located.

Fortunately, there's a way to make things faster for them (and it's not only for larger files, like photos of products also). A Content delivery network (CDN) displays the stored content on servers that are which are located close to users instead of content on demand from a single location. It improves the user experience for all the customers.

With a CDN like Jetpack, cached (that is, not current-to-the-second) copies of your store will be shown to visitors. The visitors will also be able to access material directly from the CDN server the closest to them. Both speeds down load times dramatically particularly for photos with large sizes as well as media file sizes.

In addition to compression, utilizing a CDN is a fantastic option to deliver product images very quickly and efficiently, particularly when you do not update your store on a frequent frequency. And of course, if you need to update your store in a hurry then you'll need to turn off your CDN off.

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

The ideas offered above are the biggest, most meaningful things you can accomplish to find a compromise between product photos that look good and load quickly. But here are a few additional tips to bear on your the back of your mind:

• Opt for background that is white. In general, the less colours an image is made up of and the fewer colors it has, the smaller its file size is. This is even more applicable when compression comes into use and the color palette is diminished further.
• Eliminate unnecessary product shots. Do you have images of your shoes that you're selling at ten different angles? Then you can reduce the number to five and cut the loading time in half.
• Load thumbnails first before bringing up full-size images when clicked. This way shoppers will expect to wait for the bigger images.
• Lazy load images. Lazy loading images speeds up page loading by loading images that are above the fold and loading other images when users scroll to where they are 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, may improve performance and improve 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, geographic data images, descriptions of the image, etc. Sometimes it is possible to save this information however, you could also free the space in your files by not storing the metadata when compressing the images.

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

It might seem like the only method to create stunning images of your products is to settle with a slow-loading store or that the only option to get quick-loading product pages is to opt for small images that are compressed to a high degree. However, we disagree.

By making a couple of adjustments to your photos of products You can achieve an ideal balance of speedy loading and fantastic-looking. Your site - or your customers need to be slowed down.