Images play an integral role when it comes to web design. Not only do images help attract attention, but they also showcase your products or services, and help visitors understand the purpose of your website. This level of clarity is essential when your aim is to part website visitors from their hard earned cash! But images can also slow your website down, load improperly and take up a lot space. So what can you do about that? Well, that’s where optimising images comes into play. And for a professional website that really has the edge over others, image optimisation is essential. Here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we work with companies and businesses across the region to deliver web design solutions that will lead to measurable success. As a result, we have produced this guide to optimising images for web design.
Optimising images for web design
To make sure that your images are not only fit for purpose on your website, but are also a perfect fit, you should consider:
- choosing the right file type
- compressing the image
- responsive images
- and image loading options
Image file type for web design success
Uploading an image that is an appropriate file type will save space and improve the loading speed of your website. When determining which file type to use, think about the purpose of the image, and which file will provide the best visual result on a range of screen sizes. Make sure you opt for the file type that will provide the smallest file size, while still being a high quality, professional image. JPG is the most common image file type, but you can also use PNG, and Vector images too.
Image compression for web design
If your website is loading slowly, the chances are you haven’t compressed your images. Compression is an amazing tool for web designers. And it means that your images will be dramatically reduced in file size, without loosing any quality at all. So your hero images, and product images can be just as large in terms of dimensions and screen size, but they will not take up as much room. And they will also still look impressive. Compression means that it is so much quicker for users opening your website to load the images. Whether they use a mobile device or a desktop, your load speed will be increased. And this can also help boost your ranking on the search engine results page too!
Responsive images
When it comes to responsive design, it is essential that your website looks just as good on a mobile or smart device, as it does on a desktop computer or laptop. This includes the image quality. Users on a mobile device that try to load images that are not designed for a responsive experience, will load an image that is just as large as it is on the desktop version, but then shrinks to fit the screen size. While this works in a way, it can make the user experience unnecessarily slow and awkward. And it can eat up user data. Check out this guide to make your website images fully responsive, and keep your users happy.
Loading priorities
If your website loading time is still a problem, even with the right file sizes, compression and responsive images, you could alter your loading priorities. To do this, you have two main options:
- Load the images only when needed- so your hero image and above the fold content will load first, and when the user scrolls, any more images will then load. This is a similar method to that used by Pintrest.
- Blur up loading- load the images as a blur first, before replacing the images with the full version once ready.
For more information or advice about optimising images for web design, get in touch with the professionals today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.