How do you get fast-loading, Fantastic-Looking Product Photos

However, adding these photos on your store's website can cost you. For every large image or media file that you upload to the product's page it will take longer to load. And your shoppers, no matter how interested they are, aren't willing to be waiting around for very long.

The most frequent question that store owners find themselves asking is this: How do I speed up image loading with a beautiful, high-resolution look? It might sound like a challenge, but there's actually quite a couple of simple methods to ensure that you balance fast product photos and fantastic images.

First, let's have some insight into why web speed is important. Then, we'll go over some tips for how you can reduce the load duration of your images while preserving their quality.

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

There are several reasons why having fast-loading images of products is equally important as having attractive ones. The one that most proprietors of stores think of first is search engines.

There is no doubt that sites with speed have better performance in search rankings, all other things considered equal. The higher you are in rankings, the greater organic traffic that you can drive to your site. It's not the only reason that speed is so important. Google only made speed a ranking factor at the beginning in order to prioritize User Experience (UX) on the web.

What it boils at: shoppers don't want to wait. They don't want to be waiting for deliveries and they do not want to be waiting for responses or answers, and certainly do not want to wait for your store to load. Therefore, if you provide your potential customers an unresponsive, slow website, what does that say regarding their experience with you?

So while large image files can slow down loading pages which can affect your SEO, these slow pages may also irritate your customers. importantly -- irritate your shoppers. This is why it's important to strike that balance between fast and beautiful.

So, with that thought in mind Let's look into the methods you can use to make your image files smaller while preserving their quality.

Make sure to save images in WebP or JPEG format unless you need transparency.

In general, WebP should be the first option, and JPEG as second best, unless you need transparency in some way. In the event that transparent is necessary, you should opt for transparent PNG.

Some formats are bigger or aren't as suitable for web compression. If you're tempted to use a funny animated GIF for the product's page it's best to reconsider. It's a tradeoff to speed up loading times. isn't worth the quick laugh your shoppers might have.

Let's take a look at the file sizes in this photo of the cup of tea set against a white background when it was saved using one of the most common image formats. No image compression was run on this file. These are just the size of the files when saving this image in 1280x853 pixels, at the full resolution.

As you can see, the most compact file format is WebP file with JPEG in a close third. The biggest size of file is in the TIF file format. It is estimated that the GIF file is nearly twice the size of a WebP file. If this were some kind of animated GIF then it'd be even larger.

Not only do images save in different sizes and at their highest quality, but they have distinct compression capabilities and compression capabilities. After running image file optimization for each of these image files in Photoshop by adjusting the settings to result in pictures of the same image quality, here are the results:

The WebP image again saved to the smallest file size -which was by a wide distance. The JPEG has also decreased the size of its files by a significant amount. Its PNG was not able to have any savings in file size and the diminution in dimensions of GIF was minimal. Utilizing LZW compression for the TIFF image, it saved a significant amount of file size as however, the final file is still over 2.5x larger than the non-compressed WebP image.

If you've got thousands of files on your site it is possible to see the advantages of compressing WebP or JPEG images can save tons of space while keeping the loading times of your images relatively fast.

NOTE: AVIF is another image format which is believed to be more compressible as WebP. While it does have wide support but it's not as widely supported like WebP. If you use Adobe Photoshop to process pictures, you'll need install a plug-in to open AVIF images 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 a zoom function enabled on your website, that's). It is thankfully achieved with the help of the software for image compression.

Many of these applications are so effective that an untrained eye is in awe of the distinction between images that are compressed and those not.

Before compressing your pictures, you'll want to determine what the maximum file size is that your pictures will be displayed. Mobile devices tend to use larger resolution screens with higher resolution as compared to desktop computers. However, high-definition displays are becoming more common on desktop.

It is possible that a wide 500px image displaying in a 500px-wide space isn't very appealing, and a 800px or 1000px-wide image looks better constrained to 500px on an iPhone or a retina-based desktop display.

Play around with your image sizes to find out what you can find the most balance for your items. Also, if you're providing a zoom option to your images of products, you'll want to use more large images than you would if had thumbnails.

After you've determined the maximum size of your pixel should be, you can move on to converting your high-resolution product images to optimized, web-ready images.

We'll take a look some of the programs that can be used to generate fast-loading product photos on your website.

Adobe Photoshop

If you use the latest version Adobe Photoshop, there are several options to save your images in format that is optimized for you. It is possible to use the Save as feature. Just be sure to modify your file name when saving the file in the same file format that the original file. You can also make use of Export as or the old Save feature for Weboption (until that feature is no longer supported).

Each of these options will have steps during the saving process which will let you adjust the settings for compression of your images. However, each option does offer different features and options.

• Save As is the only option. Save as will allow users to save an WebP file.
• The only two options, Export to and Save for Web permit you to alter the dimensions of your photo in the process of saving. If you're using Save As then you'll have to resize your image to the size you'd like it to be in Photoshop before saving it.
• The legacy Save For Web option is the only one that will show you an approximate loading time and resulting file size before exporting your image. This feature allows users to alter the your animation loop's settings for the GIF and provide you with granular options on what metadata to include or not in the file.

The other alternatives in all of the methods will be the same -- select whether to retain or remove metadata, include the color profile of your choice, as well as adjust the image's quality (lossy or lossless).

No Photoshop? Problem solved: Try one of these free online tools

There aren't many people who have access to Photoshop, but this shouldn't be a reason to put you off. There are plenty of web-based tools for free that are designed to compress your photos.

Two of the top are Kraken Image Optimizer and ShortPixel. Both tools shrink your images to a surprisingly small dimensions while still maintaining quality.

When the tool is finished uploading your images you'll have the option to save them to your computer and then upload them to your online store.

The two applications' free versions contain some limitations regarding the number of files and/or maximum file size that they can upload and therefore it could be somewhat more time-consuming and time-consuming than Photoshop or the paid plan. However, it is free and if you don't have a large catalog of hundreds of items, then this might work for you.

Do you have a WordPress account ? Modify the WordPress settings or test using a plugin

You may or may not be aware that compression of images is built right into WordPress. This compression shrinks your JPEGs to 82 percent of the size they were originally however, this may not be enough for sites who prefer huge, highly-detailed photos or large galleries.

One option you have to limit this built-in compression is to edit WordPress's functions.php file. It will let you increase -- or decrease, if you prefer the level of automatic compression that occurs prior to your images hitting your Media Library.

Want an easier method? Try an application. ShortPixel comes with its own version that works for nearly every type of file which includes Apple's HEIC format, so you are able to add images directly via your iPhone. With a free account, you will receive 100 credits every month.

Enable a content delivery network for your store

Even though new Internet connections and improved hosting capabilities have sped up the time taken for a shopper to load your store, there can remain connectivity issues. These can slow down site time to load, especially when your customer is located around distance from where your server is located.

Luckily, there's a method to speed things up to speed things up (and it's not only for larger files, like photos of products, either). A content delivery network (CDN) displays the stored content on servers that are physically close to visitors instead of on-demand content in a single place. This speeds up the browsing experience for everyone 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 information directly from the CDN server close to their. Both of these things speed down load times dramatically, especially for large photos and media documents.

Along with the compression feature, using a CDN can be a great method of serving product images very swiftly particularly when you do not update your shop on a regular basis. Of course, if you need to update your store in a hurry then you'll need to turn off on the CDN off.

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

The suggestions above are the largest, most important things you can accomplish to find a compromise between images of products that appear great and load fast. But here are a few more tips to keep in mind:

• Select White backgrounds. In general, the less colours an image is made up of, the smaller the file size will be. It is also applicable when compression comes into play and the palette is further reduced.
• Eliminate unnecessary product shots. Do you have images of your shoes that you're selling from 10 different angles? You can probably reduce it to five, and cut down the load time by half.
• load thumbnails first, then only display the entire size when you click. So, shoppers don't have to be waited for larger pictures.
• Images that load slowly. Lazy loading images improves page speed by only loading images over the fold, and also loading additional images once users scroll where they are at on the page. The Jetpack plugin does not just provide CDN functions, but also lazy loading of images. Jetpack additionally offers various WordPress optimizers that, while not all directly related to images, may improve speed and enhance user experience.
• Strip unnecessary metadata. Depending on the reason for your photo file, it could contain a significant amount of metadata, including copyright details Keywords, tags, geographic data such as descriptions of images, and so on. 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 your images.

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

It might seem like the best way to get stunning images of your products is to settle with a slow-loading store or that the only way to speed up loading pages is to go with tiny pictures that are extremely compressed. But we beg to differ.

With just a few optimizations to your product photos, you can find the ideal balance between speedy loading and stunning. And neither your site -- nor your shoppers -- will have to slow down.