3 Step Process to Optimize your Images for Speed and SEO
We’ve been talking about how you can improve your website speed for the past few weeks. We talked about how you can test your website speed and the top 3 ways you can improve your website speed.
Optimizing your images will not only make your website faster but also help improve your search engine results.
In this blog post, I’ll be walking you through my step-by-step process to optimize your images for speed and SEO.
Step 1: Optimize your image size
Before uploading your image to your website make sure the image has been optimized. The image size should never be bigger than 2000px across, that’s more than enough to get a good-quality image.
Once you’ve resized the image run it through an image optimiser. I highly recommend Tiny PNG.
This will allow your image to be lighter and load faster.
Step 2: Rename your image
Your image file name is an often overlooked part of optimizing your images. Having a good naming structure will help you:
- find your images easily
- improve website speed
- improve SEO
A good image name should describe what’s on the image and where it’s being used, this will help you find the image in the future.
File names should not contain spaces or special characters. This will help improve your website speed by providing a file that can be easily read on the internet.
Step 3: Adding Alt tags to your images
Once you’ve optimized your image and renamed it’s ready to upload to your site. When you add the image to a page make sure to add an alt tag that describes the image and where it is.
Alt tags have a double function that makes them important to add to all your images. They are used to tell visually impaired people what the image contains and by search engines to identify the images being used.
Adding alt tags to your images will help make your website more accessible while improving your search results.
Taking these 3 steps to optimize your images is fast and easy and will improve your website going forward. It’s one habit that you can add to your workflow that will have a massive impact on your website going forward.