Image optimization is crucial for improving web traffic, user engagement, and sales in a WordPress site.
People prefer images over text. So, no wonder why images often take a key role in making effective web pages.
However, as you increase a number of images on your page, a load time of the page increases as well.
Thus, the size of image files affects page load speed.
Besides the image size, you need to make sure your image has great SEO and accessibility support to keep your web pages effective.
In this article, you will learn easy tips and ways to optimize your image in order to improve SEO and accessibility of a WordPress site.
Optimize image size
Large sized images slow down web pages.
Unfortunately, many website owners overlook this problem.
As a result, uncompressed images reduce the page load speed, which not only terribly ruins user experience but also negatively affects SEO of your WordPress site.
You can use Squoosh as a quick and easy way to optimize your image before uploading it to a WordPress site.
This free web service has simple options to compress and prepare images for a production site.
Optimize image SEO and accessibility
Search engines are capable of reading the image attributes such as title and alt, since they have a value for search engine optimization.
Yet, there is one more thing which can boost SEO of your images, while still keeping it accessible.
Improve image SEO
Image search engine optimization is super helpful when you want to increase traffic on a website.
WordPress comes with options to set title and alt attributes for your image. So, you can keep your images optimized.
You can set them after image upload to a WordPress site, using the Media Library functionality.
Alternative text, also called alt text, is used to understand what the image is about.
If the image is not used for decoration purposes then it should include alternative text.
Google, and other search engines, use alt text to understand the context of your image.
Title text is used to provide further information about the image.
It is optional for the image to have title text.
Also, title text does not have that much of potential benefits for SEO as alternative text.
Thus, use title text when the image needs further explanation, and you want to display this information as a tooltip.
Image file name is also used to understand the content of the image.
Thus, make sure to use a short, yet descriptive, file name.
It helps to provide Google, and other search engines, clues about the subject matter of the image.
Improve image accessibility
Because not everyone, who visits your site, is able to see the images, it is crucial to make these images accessible.
Alternative text plays important role not only for SEO purposes but also for accessibility.
Since search engines and screen readers cannot read images, they use alternative text as a source of the image description.
Also, alt text is automatically used in cases when an image file fails to load on a web page.
Moreover, some users may have images disabled in areas with slow internet connection.
By adding alt text to the image, you can provide an alternative for those users who cannot perceive visual content.
Conclusion
Images are a key part of web design. However, they can cause harm for your site if not used properly.
Hopefully, this tutorial was useful, and you learned multiple ways to optimize images in your WordPress site.
If you have any additional tips regarding image optimization, please let me know if the comments below.
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