Optimizing Images for Web Performance - a 6-step guide for 2021

Takeaways

  • Serve images in next-gen formats: Use AVIF and WebP, with JPG as fallback
  • Efficiently encode images with a balance between compression and quality
  • Properly size images: Use a responsive layout, set an explicit width and height and create multiple image sizes
  • Optimize image loading using content-visibility, lazy loading and async decoding
  • Serve images with an efficient cache policy, use a CDN if necessary
  • Mind SEO and screen readers, use alt attributes

Introduction

Summary: Images are a huge part of the web. Performance is one of the biggest success factors for websites. Optimize your images to improve your user’s experience.

When building a modern web experience, it is essential to measure, optimize and monitor the speed of your website. Performance plays a significant role in the success of any website, as powerful websites appeal to and engage users better than low-performing websites. Websites should focus on optimizing user-centric happiness metrics. Consider this: **No one likes small but ugly images, but no one wants to wait. Welcome to the world of image compression. **

In this article, we outline all the methods to optimize your images. We minimize the bandwidth used to load images and reduce the CPU usage for displaying images. In addition, I offer you all kinds of solutions to ensure perfect optimization, including SEO.

Suppose you have formatted your images for better performance and follow best practices. In that case, your page will become more popular with search engines, browsers and networks and will load faster for your readers. Especially with half of your visitors likely using a mobile device, delivering optimal image file formats and sizes is even more critical. Otherwise, your hard-earned traffic will decrease, and your Google rankings will also decline.

Google Core Web Vitals

To understand how and why we should optimize our images, we need to understand Core Web Vitals. Several case studies confirm that increased page load time leads to frustrated users and an increased bounce rate.

To address this problem, Google has introduced Core Web Vitals, which will become an integral part of its ranking algorithm starting from July 2021. Core Web Vitals provides you with a comprehensive view of how the performance of your application impacts your end-user experience.

It consists of three main components that optimize the page experience.

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP is the period during which the most significant content element in the viewport is made visible as soon as the user requests the URL. It is an important, user-centric metric for measuring the perceived load speed. It marks the point in the timeline where the page's main content is likely to have been loaded. This is important because it tells the reader that the URL is loading and the page is helpful.

Images are one of the most important types of elements that are considered for the LCP. LCP is primarily influenced by slow servers, load times of resources and client-side rendering. Optimizing your LCP will demonstrate that your page is usable and that content is displayed quickly. We will do so by reducing bytes, caching and lazy loading.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

The FID metric helps measure your user's first impression of the interactivity and responsiveness of your website. FID is a crucial, user-centered measure of load responsiveness. It quantifies the experience users feel when trying to interact with non-responsive pages - it ensures that the site is usable.

The first impression users have of how quickly your website is can be measured with First Contentful Paint (FCP). But how fast your website can paint pixels on the screen is part of the story. Equally important is how responsive your website reacts when users try to interact with these pixels. If you have ever tried clicking within an input box and nothing happens, then you are familiar with the frustration that can be caused by large input delays.

FID measures the time from the first time a user interacts with a page, i.e., when they click a link or tap on a button, to the time when the browser is able to process event handlers in response to that interaction. This measurement is taken from whatever interactive element that the user clicks on first. By using our techniques, **we will reduce FID through reduced (main-thread) CPU usage. **

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS is an important, user-centric metric for measuring visual stability because it helps quantify how often users experience unexpected layout shifts—a low CLS helps ensure that the page is delightful. Have you ever been reading an article online when something suddenly changes on the page? Without warning, the text moves, and you've lost your place. Or even worse: you're about to tap a link or a button, but in the instant before your finger land the link moves, and you end up clicking something else!

CLS measures the sum total of all individual layout shift scores for every unexpected layout shift that occurs during the entire lifespan of the page. This is important to us because for example having images without dimensions can cause elements shift while a user is trying to interact with it, leading to a bad user experience. With techniques in this article, we will keep CLS to zero.

Summary of image optimization benefits

Depending on how your website is structured, images make up the bulk of data that needs to be loaded. The smaller the file sizes of the images, the faster a website loads. But you don't want to end up with a grainy or blurry-looking website, especially in times of high-resolution screens.

Properly optimized images still have their visual quality intact - and when you run an e-commerce site, that's important to win customers' trust. By improving your vitals, you can boost your site's ranking in comparison with your competitors.

Main advantages

  • Faster Loading: It improves the loading speed of your site. If your site takes too long to load, your visitors might get tired of waiting and move on to something else.
  • Better SEO: Page speed has been a ranking factor in Google's algorithm for some time, but it will be an even more significant part in the future. Your site will rank higher in search engine results.
  • Less Size: Creating backups will be faster. Smaller image file sizes will consume less bandwidth and also take up less space on your server.
  • Better User Experience: Page performance and visual input are the main factors in purchasing decisions. Optimizing images is a huge factor in increasing conversion.

Let's examine they ways in which you can be optimizing images.

1) Serve images in next-gen formats

Summary: Use AVIF, then WebP and JPG as a fallback. Try to automate this process for your own sake.

The primary goal of formatting your images is to find the **balance between the lowest file size and acceptable quality. **The two primary things to consider are the file format and the type of compression you use. You need to experiment with some images to see what works best. When comparing images, remember to view them in the dimensions in which they will appear on your website.

The goal is not to compare enlarged 1:1 previews of high-resolution files, but to compare images with realistic pixel dimensions. This chapter focuses on the file format, while the next chapter will focus on the type of compression.

Other formats than JPG and PNG

If you know the right file formats and how to handle different types of images in different file formats, you can know which file type to use to speed up the loading time of your website while maintaining good image quality.

Most websites provide images in JPEG and PNG formats that have been around since the 1990s. JPG is the dominant image format on the web, but that doesn't mean it's the best. A new generation of image formats offers the ability to further reduce your image file sizes. Moving to these next-generation image formats reduces the size of image files and pages, resulting in faster loading times, especially on mobile devices. This is especially important for the page experience of your visitors. These formats are:

  • WebP
  • AVIF
  • JPEG XL

Although device and browser compatibility varies for each format, **it is worth evaluating for the reduction in image file size **and overall faster downloading of your website. WebP, for example, can be an excellent replacement for JPEG, PNG and even GIF images in many cases. It also supports lossless compression, lossy compression and animated images. In most cases, WebP images can reduce image file size by about 25-50%.

Browser compatibility

If your target audience falls into one of the unsupported browser / device categories, you should ship optimized **fallback images in the original JPEG / PNG format **so that your users do not see a broken or poorly designed page. There are several types of files you can use that you can see below. There are several others, such as JPEG XR, JPEG2000 and HEIC. However, they are old and have no support for their age.

  • PNG: created as a lossless image format, it produces higher quality images, but also has a larger file size
  • JPEG: uses lossy optimization. You can adjust the quality level for a good balance between quality and file size
  • GIF: uses 256 colors, has been popular for small videos, but is becoming less popular due to the size
  • SVG: is a vector image format for two-dimensional graphics with support for interactivity and animation
  • WebP: is an image format developed by Google to create smaller or better looking images compared to the JPEG, PNG or GIF image formats
  • AVIF: is a fairly new image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format
  • JPEGXL: is a royalty-free lossy and lossless format offering backwards compability with JPEG, designed to become a universal image format

Explaining the best usecase for all formats

(Not) Using GIF

Most platforms that host short videos do not use GIFs because animated GIFs can be large. Twitter, for instance, converts animated GIFs to video file formats such as MP4 to significantly reduce the total file size. Even GIPHY, an online directory and search engine that provides users with access to short loop videos without audio, uses MP4 video files.

Fortunately, this is one of the areas where you can achieve significant results with relatively little effort. By converting large GIFs to videos, you can reduce your bandwidth requirements. Animated GIFs have three main features that a video must replicate:

  • They play automatically
  • They loop continuously
  • They're silent

Luckily, you can recreate these behaviors using the video element.

1<video autoplay loop muted playsinline></video>

Using PNG

The Portable Network Graphics PNGs format was best used when saving graphics with limited colors. Logos and icons are good examples of images that would use the .png image file format. Simple graphics with few colors can be saved as .png files to create high-quality images with low file sizes that are perfect for use on a website. This format is higher-quality than JPG images, so it is used for graphical images with more complicated designs.

PNG's main advantage was that it also provides transparent image backgrounds that can be overlaid on colored backgrounds. The compromise is that PNG images are larger than JPG images, so their use will have a much worse impact on loading time. However, since newer file formats support transparency and a good compression rate, you should not use PNG.

Using JPG

JPG has done an excellent job in keeping file sizes small over the last 20 years. It uses lossy compression, which allows dynamic compromise between quality and file size. It is by far the most widely used image format in the world, as it is supported by every digital device and software.

Although there are several other file formats that already surpass JPG in every aspect, the fact that it is supported everywhere makes it a durable format. It can be assumed that JPG is dying out slowly and will be replaced by AVIF or JPEGXL in the future.

Until then, it is best to use JPGs on your site for fallback support if your visitors browsers do not support the latest image formats. Fortunately, Mozilla Research has developed mozjpeg for the file size of your images, a production-quality JPEG encoder that is compressing images while maintaining compatibility with the vast majority of decoders used. Utilizing it will **save around 15% of the high file size **that jpg has in comparison to newer formats.

Using SVG

Vector images are images that do not use pixel data, but **use mathematical code-based data to create an image. **Vector files have historically been used for all printing forms because a vector image retains its quality regardless of size.

A vector-format logo can be printed on a business card, and the same file can be used to print the logo on a billboard. The quality of the image will be perfect without data loss of any size. SVGs are often used for logos or backgrounds that do not use many different colors.

SVG images are responsive across devices, meaning that symbols and graphs are displayed correctly regardless of how they are viewed. They are typically small file sizes and help to increase loading speed. Use them for every image that has precise geometric shapes and doesn't rely too much on color.

Using WebP

WebP is a modern image format developed by Google to provide superior lossless and lossy compression for optimizing web images. At a comparable quality compared to JPG, WebP images are 25% smaller.

In addition to better compression, the format also **supports transparency **and is therefore a good substitute for PNG.

Browser support for WebP is universal at 95%. You will need to provide a PNG or JPEG image for other browser support. Instructions on how to do this can be found at the end of this chapter.

Using AVIF

AVIF is the newest image format that has taken hold in web browsers and is currently supported in Chrome, Opera and Firefox. Safari support is not yet available, but is being actively edited. As Apple is in the group behind the format, we can expect future support. **AVIF is remarkable because it significantly exceeds JPEG in every aspect, especially the file size. **

Using JXL

A modern image format optimized for web environments. JPEG XLgenerally has better compression than WebP, JPEG, PNG and GIF, and was designed to supersede them. JPEG XL competes with AVIF, which has similar compression quality but fewer features overall. Unfortunately, it is not yet supported by any browser and should therefore not be a concern for the time being.

How to convert all these image formats correctly?

Opt for JPG as a general fallback, followed by WebP, which is better and has broad support, followed by AVIF, which is the latest active fileformat with less support.

To implement this progressive improvement for AVIF, use the picture element. The actual img element is nested in the picture. Until recently, it was relatively difficult to encode AVIF images on the server side, but with the latest version of libraries like sharp it is trivial.

1<picture>
2<source srcset="image.avif" type="image/avif">
3<source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">
4<img src="image.jpg" alt="AVIF example with WebP and JPEG fallback">
5</picture>

There are more possibilities for support and conversion

  • NodeJS: Use the sharp library
  • AMP: Consider displaying all amp-img components in WebP formats while setting an appropriate fallback for other browsers.
  • Drupal: Consider installing and configuring a module to use the WebP image formats on your website. Such modules automatically generate a WebP version of your uploaded images to optimize loading times.
  • Joomla: Consider using a plugin or service that automatically converts your uploaded images to the optimal formats.
  • Magento: Consider searching the Magento Marketplace for a variety of third-party extensions to use newer image formats.
  • WordPress: Consider a plugin or service that automatically converts your uploaded images to the optimal formats. WebP Express, Shortpixel, Smush and Imagify.
  • Cloudflare: Activate the function in the Resize Image module.

2) Efficiently encode images

Summary: Compress images. Find a good compromise between the quality settings and compression of images. Use lossless compression for photography, lossy for everything else. Images shouldn’t look blurry or pixelated.

When you look at your page requests, images are likely to account for the majority of your total page size compared to HTML, CSS, or JavaScript files. If these images are uncompressed, they waste bandwidth and increase page load times, as the browser has to spend more time downloading.

Uncompressed images are likely to be served in high quality, resulting in a large file size. The larger the image, the more time the browser spends downloading, further increasing the waiting time for your visitors to the page. If this is done for multiple images on your page, file sizes can increase significantly and result in as low page. **Efficient image encoding reduces your image file and thus the page size and helps to speed up page loading. **

Lossy vs. lossless compression

It is also important to understand that there are two types of compression, lossy and lossless. Images are optimized by reducing the amount of data contained in an image, called data compression.

Lossy - this is a filter that eliminates some of the data, which degrades the image, so you have to be careful about how much you want to shrink the image. Normally, this works because our eyes can process an image correctly even without every single piece of pixel. File size can be reduced by a large amount.

Lossless compression reduces the size of an image file without compromising image quality. No data is lost using this method. However, the file size cannot be improved as much as with lossy compression. Use a good image optimization tool to handle image compression for you, at the quality level you feel comfortable with.

**Lossless suits photography websites, use lossy for everything else. **

How to efficiently encode images?

There are a few strategies to efficiently encode images, such as:

  • Manually compressing with tools like npmavif.io or Imageoptim
  • NodeJS: sharp librbary
  • Drupal: Consider using a module that automatically optimizes and reduces the size of images. Ensure you are using the Drupal's built-in Responsive Image Styles
  • Joomla: Consider using an image optimization plugin that compresses your images while retaining quality.
  • Magento: Consider using a third-party Magento extension that optimizes images.
  • WordPress: Consider using a plugin that compresses your images while retaining quality and optimizing image delivery.
  • Shopify: Consider using a plugin that compresses your images while retaining quality and optimizing image delivery.
  • Image CDN: You can use a CDN to deliver images that are optimally compressed, adapted to the visitor's device and delivered from the nearest geographical location to your visitor. Try Cloudflare.

3) Properly size images

One of the most worthwhile optimizations you can make in the interest of web performance is to provide images in the correct size. An all too common problem is that images are uploaded at full resolution or of enormous dimensions. In this case, the browser must resize these images to a fraction of their original size for display, wasting time and resources.

Ideally, your site should never provide images larger than the version rendered on the user's screen. For optimum website performance, images should be as large as they are needed to fill their "containers," based on your page layout.

Slide show images, for example, arewider; blog images are medium in size at a width equal to the page width minus the sidebar; thumbnails are smaller. For each image on the page, we compare the size of the rendered image with the size of the actual image. **Anything larger will result in wasted bytes and slow the page's loading time. **

The main strategy for providing correspondingly large images is called "responsive images." With responsive images, you generate multiple versions of each image and then specify which version to use in which scenario.

Therefore, it is crucial to first determine the image dimensions to know how wide your content area is on your site. Take this site as an example. The content area of this site has an exact maximum of 720px, which is why the image sizes in my blog content exist in the following dimensions:

  • 1440px for retina devices
  • 720px as a default for desktop
  • 540px for other mobile devices, as an additional step
  • 360px for the most common mobile devices

Yes, there are many mobile devices with 412 / 414 pixels, but the additional conversion reduces the file size by less than a few kilobytes, which is fine because we don't want to flood our servers with billions of images.

Of course, the above example works for images within a fixed width container. If you want a full width image, consider creating your images with typical screen widths such as 2560px, 1920px or 1366px.

How do we implement different sizes in our code?

We use the attributes srcset and sizes as shown below. The w selector tells the browser which URL to use based on the physical pixels that would be used if the image was drawn to the user's device given the width calculated from the sizes attribute.

Hereby, the browser downloads the smallest possible image that provides the user with the best image quality. Or it selects a smaller image if the user has, for example, opted for some data saving mode. Provide more source elements with srcsets for browsers that support older image formats.

1<picture>
2<source type="image/avif"
3srcset="/img/image-1440.avif 1440w, /img/image-720.avif 720w, /img/image-540.avif 540w, /img/image-360.avif 360w"
4sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
5<source type="image/webp"
6srcset="/img/image-1440.webp 1440w, /img/image-720.webp 720w, /img/image-540.webp 540w, /img/image-360.webp 360w"
7sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
8<source type="image/jpeg"
9srcset="/img/image-1440.jpg 1440w, /img/image-720.jpg 720w, /img/image-540.jpg 540w, /img/image-360.jpg 360w"
10sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
11<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2880" height="1620" src="/img/image-1440.jpg" alt="example image">
12</picture>

How do we automate the resize process?

With so many lines of code, manually performing this task can be a difficult process for any image, so here are some automation options:

  • NPMJS: Use tools like sharp, gulp-responsive or responsive-images-generator
  • AMP: Use the amp-img component's support for srcset to specify which image assets to use based on the screen size
  • Angular: Consider using the BreakpointObserver utility in the Component Dev Kit to manage image breakpoints
  • Drupal: Use the built-in Responsive Image Styles feature (available in Drupal 8 and above)
  • Gatsby: Use the gatsby-image plugin to generate multiple smaller images for smartphones and tablets and image placeholders for efficient lazy loading
  • Joomla: Consider using a responsive images plugin
  • WordPress: Upload images directly through the media library to ensure that the required image sizes are available
  • Image CDNs like Cloudflare are another main strategy for serving appropriately sized images

4) Optimize image loading process

Summary: Optimize the loading process by using an explicit width and height for aspect ratio as well as lazy-loading.

a) Use a responsive layout

This is a well-understood technique for using an image horizontally up to its maximum size while maintaining the aspect ratio. A new feature in 2020 is that web browsers reserve the correct vertical space for the image before it is loaded when the width and height attributes are provided for the img element.

1<style>
2 img {
3 max-width: 100%;
4 height: auto;
5 width: 100% /* if you like to resize the image to the width of the container */
6 }
7</style>
8<img height="853" width="1280" … />

b) Use explicit width and height on image elements

Always include width and height size attributes to your images and video elements. This approach ensures that the browser can allocate the right amount of space in the document while loading the image. Image and /or video elements that are not explicitly declared with height and width attributes arere-dimensioned using CSS.

In this case, the browser can determine the dimensions and allocate space to them after downloading the "non-large images" and / or videos.

You will find that when the browser retrieves these images, your page content is constantly pushed down or moved from its original position as the browser resizes the images and positions them on your page. Layout shifts can be frustrating for your visitors, as elements may shift, potentially causing your page to appear visually disruptive.

In addition, the browser needs to do more work to recalculate the page layout, potentially affecting the performance of your page. Avoiding large layout shifts is essential to provide your visitors with a smooth and rational experience.

More importantly, the width and height attributes are used to calculate the aspect ratio of the image before it is loaded. It provides this information right at the beginning of the layout calculation. As soon as an image has a certain width, for example width: 100%, the aspect ratio is used to calculate the height.

1<img src="image.jpg" width="640" height="360" alt="Image">

c) Defer offscreen images

Deferring offscreen images or lazy loading is the practice of delaying the loading of images that are not in your visitors viewport until they are needed. Generally, when the browser loads a page, it downloads all the requested images, even those that are not immediately visible to your visitors.

Effectively, the browser spends time loading images that are not needed when you first load the page, which can affect your visitors" experience. Lazy-loading offscreen images is considered an industry best-practice, as it ensures that the browser downloads the images that are needed to display them in the viewport.

This helps to save the essential bandwidth, especially on mobile devices, resulting in a fast-perceived page. Key metrics such as Time to Interactive TTI and Speed Index SI can be improved by implementing a lazy-loading strategy.

Browsers such as Chrome and Firefox support native lazy-loading for images embedded in your HTML. Adding loading="lazy" to the img instructs the browser not to fetch the image until it moves closer to the screen and is likely to be rendered.

1<img src="image.jpg" loading="lazy">
  • AMP: Automatically lazy-load images with amp-img. See the Images guide.
  • Drupal: Install a Drupal module that can lazy load images. Such modules provide the ability to defer any offscreen images to improve performance.
  • Joomla: Install a lazy-load Joomla plugin that provides the ability to defer any offscreen images.
  • Magento: Consider modifying your product and catalog templates to make use of the web platform's lazy loading feature.
  • WordPress: Install a lazy-load WordPress plugin that provides the ability to defer any offscreen images.

d) Content-visibility

The content-visibility property could be one of the most powerful new CSS properties to improve the performance of page loading. content-visibility allows the user agent to skip the rendering work of an element, including layout and painting, until it is needed. Since the rendering is skipped when much of your content is not on the screen, using the content visibility property makes the initial user load much faster.

It also allows for faster interactions with the content on the screen. Pretty neat. The main advantage for us could be that the browser doesn't bother decoding the image unless it must, and saves the CPU.

1<style>
2 img {
3 content-visibility: auto;
4 }
5</style>

e) Asynchronous decoding

The decoding property controls if the browser is allowed to try to parallelize loading your image. Adding decoding="async" to the image gives the browser permission to decode the image off the main thread avoiding user impact of the CPU time used to decode the image. It effectively reduces delay in presenting other content.

1<img src="image.jpg" decoding="async">

5) Improve hosting behavior

Summary: Configure a cache-control header with a high max-age so users don’t have to download images multiple times. Use an image CDN and disable hotlinking to optimize your resources ### Caching

Browser caching instructs the visitor’s browser to save certain files on the local system of the visitor instead of downloading them repeatedly. Thus, for example, a visitor must download the logo image of a website on the first visit.

However, after each subsequent visit, such a visitor would download the logo file from the local cache of the website, prov ided that browser caching is enabled. Browser caching can be used for images and many other file types such as statistical resources and object data.

You want your cache headers to look like this cache control: public, max-age = 31536000. max-age = 31536000 is the fallback to the cache for one year. Public is important to allow your CDN to cache the image and deliver it from the edge. But use that if it is appropriate from a privacy perspective.

Use an image CDN

Are you serving an international audience? Then you should think of a Content Delivery Network. A Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a geographically diverse network of servers that helps speed up page loading times by reducing the distance between the visitor to the website and the server.

Content Delivery Networks are powerful tools for site optimization. Cloudflare is an example of a CDN that balances traffic across multiple destinations by using 155 + global data centers (where servers are housed). You can use its most basic services for free.

  • Inbuilt image optimization features.
  • Audience segmentation based on device viewport becomes easy.
  • Enabling fast global reach via cloud acceleration.
  • It saves many costs by eliminating the need to invest in separate server providers in different parts of the world.
  • Pulls down the load on the server to achieve reduced delivery cost.
  • Secure storage capacity.
  • Potential support for HTTP/3, WAF, and DDoS protection.

Disable hotlinking

Hotlinking means when an individual or company copies the URL of an image that belongs to another website and embeds it on their website, causing the image to appear as if it were their own content. Hotlinking is a neighbor of copyright infringement, but despite this fact, the practice is widespread.

In many cases, hotlinking is unintentional, but can cost the original owner of the image some money. It can even affect the performance of the website if an outflow of the server's resources occurs.

  • WordPress offers plugins to disable hotlinking.
  • Ask your host to disable hotlinking.
  • CPanel offers a hotlinking setting.
  • Most CDNs offer a feature to disable hotlinking.

6) SEO Image Optimization

Summary: Use an explanatory file name as well as describing title and alt attributes."

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to all the small improvements that can be made to a website to make it more readable to search engine crawlers - and therefore more likely to rank high on search engine results pages.

SEO is so critical to a website's success because nearly 70% of all online experiences start with a search engine and over 90% of global traffic comes from Google Search, Google Images and Google Maps.

The higher you can rank your pages in Google results, the more clicks you will get. Search engines like to see a page provide a high-quality user experience. Short loading times of websites, which reduce the bounce rate and increase the time on the page, are even a confirmed ranking signal from Google.

But apart from speeding up loading times, image SEO also involves contextualizing images so that visitors and search engines can understand them more easily. SEO image optimization differs from the more comprehensive image optimization described above.

So how can you use **SEO image optimization for better visibility **? There are a number of ways to make your images more accessible to search engines, which we will explain below.

1. Optimize image file names

Storing images with any default filenames can be secondary - but this random string of letters and numbers can hurt you in the long run. Before uploading an image to your website, it is important to make sure the filename is relevant, because search engines not search the text on your pages - they also search image filenames and other attributes.

2. Optimize title

Similar to filenames, picture titles are another attribute we are talking about. You have the option to add an image title after you upload it, and it can be similar or even the same as the filename -keep it short and relevant to what the picture represents!

3. Insert Alt-Text

Alt text or alternative text is text that appears in the place of an image when the image is not loaded. Alt text is important not for screen readers, but also for SEO, because it helps crawlers understand the image file and the content of a page to provide more accurate search results.

If you use WordPress or a number of popular website builders, you will be able to enter the title and alt text of an image once you upload it. In basic HTML, you canuse the alt attribute. Use your best judgement and label images when the information is useful to visitors.

Summary Checklist and code example

  • Serve images in next-gen formats: Use AVIF and WebP, with JPG as fallback.
  • Efficiently encode images with the tool of your choice.
  • Properly size images: Use a responsive layout, set an explicit width and height and create multiple images sizes.
  • Optimize loading using content-visibility, lazy loading and async decoding.
  • Serve images with an efficient cache policy, use a CDN if necessary.
  • Mind SEO and screen readers, use alt attributes.
1<picture>
2<source type="image/avif"
3srcset="/img/image-1440.avif 1440w, /img/image-720.avif 720w, /img/image-540.avif 540w, /img/image-360.avif 360w"
4sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
5<source type="image/webp"
6srcset="/img/image-1440.webp 1440w, /img/image-720.webp 720w, /img/image-540.webp 540w, /img/image-360.webp 360w"
7sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
8<source type="image/jpeg"
9srcset="/img/image-1440.jpg 1440w, /img/image-720.jpg 720w, /img/image-540.jpg 540w, /img/image-360.jpg 360w"
10sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px">
11<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="2880" height="1620" src="/img/image-1440.jpg" alt="example image">
12</picture>

More Tips

Thanks for reading the article! Have fun implementing all the features mentioned above. Here are some more general best practices when it comes down to how to optimize images for web:

  • Use SVG whenver possible.
  • Use CSS effects as much as possible (the hero gradient background on top of this page is pure CSS!).
  • Crop whitespace of images and recreate this effect using CSS.
  • Remove unnessecary image metadata.
  • Use web fonts instead of placing text within images.
  • Reduce the bit-depth (most tools do this automatically).
  • Use lossy compression where possible.
  • Mind your time. Automate the process as much as possible.
  • Replace animated GIFs with video for faster page loads.

All Image optimization tools

There are many tools and programs out there, both premium and free, that you can use to optimize your images. Some give you the tools to perform your own optimizations and others do the work for you.

Image editors

  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Gimp
  • Paint.NET

Online conversion

  • avif.io (for avif conversion)
  • Bulkresizephotos (for resizing)
  • TinyPng (for jpg and png compression)

Image CDNs

  • Cloudflare
  • Kraken.io
  • ImageKit
  • ImageEngine

Command line tools

  • GIFsicle
  • JPEGtran
  • JPEG Mini
  • OptiPNG
  • pngquant

GUI desktop tools

  • FileOptimizer
  • ImageOptim
  • Trimage

Node.JS Libraries

  • sharp

Wordpress plugins

  • Imagify Image Optimizer
  • Shortpixel Image Optimizer
  • Smush
  • Optimole
  • TinyPNG

Shopify plugins

  • Crush.pics
  • Minifier
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