Introduction
If you’re a WordPress user, then you know that it’s the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. But did you also know that WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms because of how easy it is to use?
Many new bloggers and users still don’t realize how much work goes into optimizing their images for search engine results, despite what many new bloggers and users still don’t realize how much work goes into optimizing their images for search engine results. Thankfully for everyone involved, this WordPress guide will cover everything you need to know about optimizing your WordPress site’s images so that they rank higher on Google when someone searches for them.
Your site’s design is only as good as the images you use in it.
Your website’s design is only as good as the images you use in it. A well-designed website makes for a better user experience, but the images you use can be just as important.
If you’re using stock photos from any of those sites like Shutterstock or iStockPhoto, chances are that they’ve been compressed to save space and make them load faster on your site.
This is great for performance—but it also means that these images don’t look their best. They’ll often have low contrast and soft edges (especially around text), which can make them look washed out and unprofessional if not properly optimized for speed and SEO.
Use good, unique images
- Use good, unique images. It’s important to remember that there is no point in having a website if it doesn’t look great and has poor quality. The best way to make sure your images look great is by using high-quality photos. When choosing an image for your website, think about whether you have the rights to use it. If you don’t, take another look at your options: maybe there’s an alternative image that would work better?
- Don’t use stock images unless they are genuine stock photographs (i.e., not just someone’s Instagram feed). Stock photos are typically low quality and often include watermarks or branding from whoever created them—and this could get you into trouble by violating copyright laws or making your site feel cheap and unprofessional!
- Don’t use the same image in multiple places on a page or website; each page should have its own theme/look/feel so visitors know where they are without getting confused by different styles happening throughout one page… but if there’s only one photo worth showing off then show it off on every page instead of having two versions with different levels of quality (or worse yet… both looking terrible).
Compress your images
- Start by optimizing the image size. Compressing an image will reduce its file size and load faster.
- Compress and convert your images into a .webp format, which is supported by most browsers today.
- If you’re not editing your images, use lossless compression methods such as PNG8 or PNG24. Lossless compression results in no loss of quality of the original file, but it can be quite slow when compressing large amounts of assets since it preserves all information about them (including metadata).
Add image alt text for accessibility and search optimization.
Alt text is the text that appears when you hover over an image or click on it. This is important for a number of reasons, including SEO and accessibility.
- Anchor texts from external links, which are usually clickable images, are one of the most important ranking factors for your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Also, if someone is visually impaired and does not have access to screen readers or similar technology, alt text helps them understand what they’re looking at on your website.
- If you have a lot of images on your site and don’t bother with alt tags, then it may cause problems with mobile devices as well as social media sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter because they won’t know what to display if there’s no alt attribute present in the code.
Use image sizes properly
When you upload an image, WordPress resizes it for you. WordPress will resize the image to fit your theme’s design. It does this by using image sizes like “thumbnail” or “medium.”
Image sizes are a way of telling WordPress how big or small an image should be on different screen resolutions and widths. The most common ones are:
- Thumbnail (150×150)
- Medium (300×300)
- Large (1024×768)
Add image captions to give readers context about the image, with SEO benefits
Adding captions to your images will help readers understand the context of the image, and it can also have SEO benefits.
Search engines use the alt attribute to understand what an image is about. It’s especially important if you use an image that has no text on it at all (e.g., a logo). If there isn’t any text, you’ll need to provide alternative information in this field so that Google (or other search engines) understands what your page is about before they show it in their results pages.
You should also add a caption with text describing what’s happening in the image so that people who aren’t familiar with it can understand its purpose and relevance to your content without having to click on it first. This helps improve accessibility for people who use screen readers or other assistive technologies because they won’t be left wondering “Why was this picture included?” or “What does this place look like?”
Also Read: InfiniteWP – Manage Multiple WordPress Websites From One Dashboard
Lazy load images for better performance
Lazy loading images is a way to improve your WordPress website’s performance, search engine optimization (SEO), and accessibility. This means that the images won’t be loaded until they are actually visible in the browser window.
Before we go into lazy loading options, let’s talk about how normal image loading works on a WordPress site. When you upload an image through WordPress, it automatically resizes and crops the image based on the dimensions of your post or page layout.
WordPress automatically stores the entire image in its full resolution version with all required meta data like alt text set into your uploads folder as a thumbnail version of itself so you can view it without having to load up a separate file manager program such as FileZilla every time you want to see what it looks like.
This helps keep things simple for us but also results in increased bandwidth usage due to users downloading more unnecessary data than necessary from their server’s storage space during page load times – especially if these files aren’t even visible yet (because they’re located behind other items on screen).
Leverage browser cache for a speed boost and better SEO
You can save copies of text and images from websites you visit by using the browser cache, a feature built into web browsers. The next time you visit a website, the browser will load faster because it can take advantage of these cached copies.
There are two types of caches:
- Browser cache – The files stored on your computer or mobile device (hard drive)
- Server-side caching – The files stored on servers that deliver websites to users’ browsers
Set up proper WordPress permalink structure and add social sharing cards to your site
If you’re looking to improve the overall performance of your WordPress site, the first step is to set up proper permalink structure for your content. The next step is to add social sharing buttons and captions to images in order to optimize their SEO.
Permalinks are how URLs are structured on a website, which can affect how search engines crawl through them and how they rank in SERPs. They should be consistent across pages so that Google knows they’re all part of a singular topic or section.
You can use a tool like WordPress SEO by Yoast (free) or another plugin like Permalinks Manager (free) in order to create custom permalinks based on post type or category ID numbers, instead of just using “post” or “page” as default options within the dashboard settings page (/wp-admin/options-general).
Conclusion
The takeaway from this blog post should be that WordPress image optimization is an important part of any website design project. By optimizing your images before uploading them into WordPress, you can save yourself time and headache later on down the road when trying to manage all these different assets at once!
