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

However, adding these photos to your online store could also come at a price. With each large photo or media file you add to a product page loading time is increased. Your customers regardless of how engaged they might be, aren't willing to sit long for very long.

The question store owners find themselves asking is this What can I do to speed up image loading and still maintain a stunning appearance? It may seem like a challenge, but there's actually quite number of ways that can be used to achieve speedy product images and stunning image quality.

Let's take a look at why site speed matters. Then, we'll go over the ways you can reduce the load time of your photos and still preserve their high-quality.

The speed of your site's speed is crucial (hint: it's not just about SEO)

There are many reasons that having quick-loading images of products is equally important as having attractive ones. One of the reasons that proprietors of stores think of first is searching engines.

There is no doubt that sites with speed are more effective on search engine results, with everything else being equal. Also, the higher up your rank in the searches, the more organic traffic that you can drive to your site. It's not the only reason why 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 down to: shoppers don't want to wait. They don't wish to wait for delivery times and they do not want to wait for answers or answers, and certainly do not wish to sit around waiting for your store to load. Therefore, if you provide your potential customers the slow and sluggish website, what does that say about their overall interaction with you?

While large files can slow down loading pages which can hurt search engine optimization, these slow pages can also -- more crucially, they can annoy your shoppers. And that's why it's so important to strike that equilibrium between beautiful and fast.

With that in mind we can now look at how you can utilize these methods to make your photo files smaller while preserving their quality.

Save images for later use in WebP or JPEG format unless you need transparency

Generally speaking, WebP is the best format of choice with JPEG as a second option in case you require transparency due to a reason. In the event that transparency is required it is recommended to choose transparent PNG.

Some formats are bigger or aren't as suitable for web compression. If you're inclined to put an hilarious animated GIF for your product page, you should probably reconsider. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. isn't worth the quick laugh your shoppers might have.

We'll look at the file sizes for this picture of the cup of tea set against white backgrounds when stored in the popular image formats. There was no compression of the image on this file. These are just the file sizes when saving this image with a resolution of 1280x853 pixels. resolution.

As you can see, the smallest size file is WebP file, with JPEG in a close third. The largest size file format is the TIF the file type. It is estimated that the GIF file is nearly twice the size of a WebP file. If this was some kind of animated GIF the file would be more than twice as large.

Not only do images save at different file sizes at their best quality, they also have distinct compression capabilities as well. After performing image file optimization on each of the above image files using Photoshop with settings that resulted in pictures of the same visual quality, these were the results:

The WebP image again saved to the smallest file size -- and by a very large distance. The JPEG was also able to reduce its file size considerably. The PNG didn't have any savings in file size and the diminution in dimensions of GIF was not significant. The use of LZW compression on the TIFF image saved an enormous amount of size however, the final file size is more than 2.5x larger than the non-compressed WebP file.

If you have thousands of files on your website, you can see the advantages of compressing WebP or JPEG images can save tons of space while keeping your loading time for images fairly fast.

Notice: AVIF is another image format, which tends to offer better compression as WebP. Although it has widespread support but it's not as well-supported like WebP. If you're using Adobe Photoshop to edit images, then you'll have to install a plugin to open AVIF files and save them to AVIF format.

Make use of image compression for Web-friendly images

The customers want photos of products that are large, highly precise, and are able to be zoomed into (if you've got the zoom feature enabled in your site, that's). It is thankfully achievable by using the software for image compression.

A lot of these programs have become so efficient that an untrained eyesight is incapable of spotting the difference between compressed and uncompressed images.

Before compressing your pictures before compressing them, it is important to know what the largest file size is that your pictures will be displayed. Mobile devices tend to use higher resolution displays with greater resolution as compared to desktop computers. However, higher-resolution displays are becoming frequent on desktop computers.

There is a chance that a wide 500px image displayed in a space of 500px wide isn't very appealing, and images with 1000px or 800px width appears better when it is limited to 500px for the retina display of a smartphone or desktop display.

Explore your images sizes to find out what the best balance is to fit your product. Additionally, if you are offering a zoom feature on your images for products You'll need to select more large images than you would if used thumbnails only.

When you've established the maximum size of your pixel will be, then you're able to begin to transform the original product images in high resolution into optimized web-ready photos.

We'll take a look some of the programs that you can employ to make fast-loading product photos on your website.

Adobe Photoshop

If you are using every version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your pictures using optimised formats. You can use the Save As feature. Just don't forget to change the file's name, when saving the file in the same file format as the original file. It is also possible to make use of Export as or the legacy Save feature for Weboption (until that feature is removed from support).

Each option will have steps during the saving process which will allow you to adjust the settings for compression of your images. Each option will offer different features and options.

• Only Save as allows users to save the WebP file.
• Only Export as as well as Save for Web allow you to adjust the pixel dimensions of your images in the process of saving. If you're using Save as then you'll have adjust your image's size to the size you'd like it to be within Photoshop before saving it.
• The legacy Save For Web feature is the only option which will display the approximate time to load and final file size prior to exporting your image. This feature allows users to alter the your animation loop's settings for an GIF as well as provide granular options on what metadata to include or not in your file.

The other alternatives in all of the methods remain the same: choose whether or not to remove metadata, include your color profile, as well as adjust the image's quality (lossy as well as lossless).

No Photoshop? Don't worry: you can try one of these online tools

Not everyone has access to Photoshop However, this shouldn't be a reason to put you off. There are plenty of web-based tools for free that are designed to reduce the size of your images.

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

Once the tools are finished uploading your images you'll have the option to save them and upload them to your online store.

These applications' free versions contain some limitations in terms of number of files, and/or the maximum sizes that can be uploaded as well, which means it's somewhat more laborious and time-consuming than Photoshop or their paid plans. It is free and if you do not have a huge store with hundreds of products, then this might work for you.

Are you using a plugin ? Change the WordPress settings or test a plugin

You may or may not realize that compression of images is built right into WordPress. It compresses JPEG files to 82% of their original size however, this may not be enough for stores that opt for huge, highly-detailed photos or large galleries.

Another option to manage this compression built into WordPress is to edit the WordPress functions.php file. This allows you to enhance -- or even decrease the amount of automatic compression, depending on what you like -- the amount of automatic compression which occurs prior to your images hitting your Media Library.

Want an easier method? It is always a good idea to try a plugin. ShortPixel has their own plugin, and it works with nearly every type of file including Apple's HEIC format so you can add images directly from your iPhone. If you sign up for a free account, you get 100 credits per month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though the latest Internet connectivity and better capacity of hosting have speeded up the time it takes for customers to visit your site, there could there be issues with connectivity. This can affect site time to load, especially when your customer is located around the world from the server located.

Fortunately, there's a way to speed things up to speed things up (and it's not only for larger files, like photos of products also). A Content delivery network (CDN) shows the stored content on servers that are which are located close to users instead of on-demand content that is delivered from one location. It improves the user experience for your customers. 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 content from the CDN server which is close to their. Both of these things speed down load times dramatically, especially for large photos and media file sizes.

Together with the compression feature, using a CDN is an excellent option to deliver product images extremely fast, especially in the event that you don't upgrade your shop on a regular basis. And of course, if something requires immediate updates then you'll need to turn off your CDN off.

There are other methods you can balance fast and great

The ideas offered above are the largest, and most significant things you could do to strike a balance between images of products that appear nice and load swiftly. But here are a few other tips to keep in mind:

• Choose background that is white. Generally speaking, the fewer colors an image contains more colors, the less size is. It is also relevant when compression is in play and the palette is smaller.
• Remove unnecessary images of your product. Do you have photos of the shoes you're selling from 10 different perspectives? It's probably best to reduce them to five, and cut down the loading time in half.
• Load thumbnails first then only display full-size images when clicked. So, shoppers don't have to have to wait for bigger pictures.
• lazy load of images. Lazy loading images speeds up page loading by loading images above the fold. It also loads other images once users scroll where they are at on the page. The Jetpack plugin does not just provide CDN capabilities, but it also offers lazy loading of images. Jetpack also has additional WordPress optimizing tools that, though not directly connected to images, could improve speed and enhance the experience of users.
• Eliminate any unnecessary metadata. Depending on the purpose of your image files, you could be storing a lot of metadata, including copyright details Keywords tags, geographical data images, descriptions of the image, etc. Sometimes you might want to save this information but you may also be able to save some file space by omitting it when you compress your photos.

Amazing product images don't have to slow your website (or your shoppers)

The only method to create stunning photographs of products is to opt for slow loading stores, or the best way to have fast-loading pages for your products is to opt for small pictures that are extremely compressed. However, we disagree.

By making a couple of adjustments to your photos of products and you'll find the perfect balance between fast-loading and fantastic-looking. Also, neither your website -- nor your shoppers need to slow down.