With the development of digital media, visuality gained importance rapidly. As of 2018, the images on a web site generally cover 64% of the site.

Using relevant images on your website will lead the visitors to focus on the content and visit the site again. However, there are some issues to consider when using images on your website.

When images are not optimized, they occupy a lot of space in the server. This reduces its performance and causes your web site to slow down. You should optimize your images to be able to offer a perfect user experience. This is critical when it comes to acquiring new visitors or retaining your existing customers.

Find The Right Image Format

Given the large image density of websites, the impact of images on website performance is huge. Image formats determine the size and quality of images. Therefore finding the right image format is essential for website performance.

To read our article about image formats; What Is The Best Image Format For Web? Which One To Choose?

Resize the Images

While resizing the images, xhtml and css can be used. But it is not recommended. Because that way, visitors download the original image from server and resize it at their side. This is an inefficient way in terms of bandwidth usage and image load time. It is a better practise to apply manipulations such as resizing at the server side.

Compress Images

Image compression is one of the most important step to increase your website speed. You should choose best option depending on your usage needs. Most common compression formats are jpeg, png and webp. Webp format has best compression ratio over the other ones in most scenarios.

Change the URL Structure of Your Images

The url structure of the images in the source code is one the factors that affect the website speed. You can simplify the source code by removing unnecessary extensions from the url.

Use CSS Sprite

Css Sprite is simpyle the combination of images on your website. These images are combined together and stored as if a single file. In this way, no matter how many images on your site are merged into this file, it will open as a single image file. This method shortens the load time of your website. It also helps to reduce the page size.

As a result, you can use these simple methods to prevent the negative effects of your large image sizes on your website. These methods will not only help you to save space, but also improve user experience and increase your potential visitors.

Sources:

https://www.maxcdn.com/one/visual-glossary/css-sprites/

https://image4.io/en/blog/what-is-best-image-format-for-web-which-one-to-choose/

https://kinsta.com/blog/optimize-images-for-web/s