With nearly 50,000 WordPress plugins (and counting), finding the right ones for your website/blog can sometimes seem daunting. While we haven’t had tried out every single plugin there is here at KartHost™, we do have the experience and eye to know a good plugin when we see one.
We highly recommend TinyPNG as your one stop shop in compressing images on your website for optimization.
READ MORE: BE SOCIALLY SAVVY WITH WORDPRESS PLUGINS
HOW IMAGES MAKE A DIFFERENCE
First let’s talk about the importance of images on your website/blog. Here are a few ways images make a difference, they:
- Increase Your Page Views – Let’s face it, we are living in a digital, mobile-driven world. Images grab (and keep) attention. The brain is hardwired to process images faster than text, some studies say up to 60,000 times faster, in fact.
READ MORE: HOW TO INCREASE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE
- Connect To Users – Images allow you to showcase your products and services, bringing your business/brand to life.
- Boost Your SEO (search engine optimization) – By optimizing your images (more on that below) you make them easier to find, therefore earning you a boost on search engines.
- Get Shared – Social media is a dominant force today in sharing information. The better your images, videos and taglines, the more likely they are to be shared, leading to more page views and visitors.
You should exclusively use high quality images on your website, and take time to really ensure the images you choose are relevant to your business/brand. High quality, professional images reflect an investment into your site, which in turn builds trust and esteem in your site’s visitors.
OPTIMIZING IMAGES
First of all, you may be wondering what optimizing your images actually means. This is a fancy way of saying you are fixing them so that they are web friendly. The most blatant reason to optimize your images is that Google likes it. When Google likes it, your page is more apt to be findable, aka show up in search engine result pages (SERP’s).
A few ways you can easily optimize your images are by:
- Naming your image file with keywords that relate to your image and content.
- Using the alt and title tags of the image to ensure they describe the image and are relatable to your website’s content.
- Compressing your image files to reduce file size.
High quality images usually come in large file sizes. Large files typically mean slower loading times. Slower loading times means losing your visitor’s interest in your site and uses their mobile data.
Enter TinyPNG
TinyPNG uses its own servers to compress your image files – up to 60% on JPEG and 80% on PNG files – without reducing the quality of your images, and saves you a ton of storage space and bandwidth. Therefore you still have high quality images images with faster page loading times. That translates into happier visitors and a happier Google, it’s a win-win. You can even use the TinyPNG plug-in for WordPress to resize all the images on your site.
