Let’s talk about images.

One of the easiest ways to make your website stand out is by using high-quality and eye-catching images.

Picking copyrighted images that might land you with a take down order or a financial claim, or uploaing massive files that slow your site down to a crawl (or tiny images that just look crap) are the biggest problems we see when we onboard new clients for our Care Plans.

It’s so simple to do but many website owners see to have a problem with sourcing, editing and sizing images to fit their site that they tend to leave the site alone – which can make it boring for visitors to come back to.

The jargon, the lack of clarity over what to do – it’s confusing. But it really doesn’t have to be that way.

There are just 3 simple steps to follow. Find your image, edit and then optimise it.

You can then upload it to your website safe in the knowledge you’ve done it like a pro.

Step 1. Sourcing your images

It goes without saying that the best images you can use on your business website are your own images of YOUR business. But what if you dont have any?

What you MUST NOT do is hit Google image search. This is the fast-track to trouble as you will most likely be using copyrighted images without permission. Not good.

Instead – go to pexels.com, unsplash.com or pixabay.com where you’ll find thousands of high-quality images licensed for commercial use.

Find an image you like and download it.

Now – a quick word on image sizes.

If you use an image that is too small, it will become stretched and blurry. If you use an image that is too big it will slow your site down and annoy your visitors (and earn Google’s displeasure)

As a rule of thumb – if you need a an image to be full-width choose 1920 pixels wide. Anything more is wasted and will just add bulk to your web page. We recently got a website running 3x faster just by sorting 4 images bloating the home page to over 9MB in size.

For images smaller than full-width, work down from 1920px (so an image to fit in a 3 column layout would be around 600 px). All the 3 image sites give you an option to select the size you want before downloading, so download the smallest size needed.

Step 2. Resizing, cropping & editing images

If you are happy using the tools on your computer to crop and resize your images – great. If not – take a look at picresize.com

JPG v PNG?
Always JPG, as it produces a smaller file, UNLESS the image needs transparency.

Talking of which – look at removebg.com to cut out the background. Brilliant for logos to remove that white background.

Step 3. Optimising images.

The final task is to reduce the file size as much as possible using the tools on your computer or an online alternative such as tinypng.com

Follow these tips you will have your website image game on point before you know it.