If your website has large and under-optimized images, they will interfere with the speed of your site, which will have negative repercussions on the SEO efforts of your online store. Shopify image optimization is something that every online store owner should consider incorporating. This article discusses the best methods to optimize your Shopify images and make your store more competitive.
What is to Optimize Images?
Shopify image optimization is defined as a process of resizing and compressing your Shopify images. In the optimization process, it is paramount to ensure that you conserve the quality of the images. Incorporating this strategy aims to provide your users with a very smooth experience with your store and increase your search engine rankings. The tactic can also include incorporating various text attributes, captions, and optimized titles for your site.
So how to optimize images for your Shopify store?
1.Create Images with Caution
When creating an image for your Shopify store, it is paramount to be very cautious in the creating process. It is essential to be keen on the fundamental properties of an image, such as the image characteristics, angles, and proportions of this image.
It is also essential to ensure that you use image names when creating your image. Remember to incorporate the best SEO tactics it is vital to ensure that you use the relevant keywords. When creating your photos, It is thus essential to ensure that you use a keyword-rich description.
2.Resize your Images
One important thing you should note about WebP on Shopify is that it takes good care of the store’s thumbnails. Thus if you want to optimize images, it is important to compress your images. It is paramount to aim for file sizes with an average of 70KB even lower. Remember that the larger your images, the longer it will take to load the site.
One method to compress your images is to use Adobe Photoshop. When adjusting the Save for Web command, ensure that you change the photo to 70KB or even lower. However, it is essential to check the quality of the image. Remember, the Photoshop program helps to reduce the number of pixels. There are also other tools in this program that helps to refocus the image so that you can ensure that the quality of the image is not entirely lost.
You can also compress Shopify images using automatic tools. Ensure you find a tool that is precisely designed for Shopify. The tool will help automatically resize your images while still conserving the quality of the images.
3.Ensure that you Optimize your Alt
Alt descriptions or tags are the text that will appear instead of an image if the image fails to load on the website. They are primarily used for web accessibility. It is important to note that alt highly contributes to the SEO of your store. Thus it is essential to add valuable and relevant tags. Your eCommerce products will appear on various Google search engines using the best tags. When incorporating the alt tags, ensure that you use plain language. Some of the rules you need to incorporate in your alt tags mainly include:
- Ensure that you don’t stuff keywords
- Ensure that you don’t include alt tags for the decorative image
- Include models for your alt tags
4.Use the Appropriate File Type
When setting up images for your Shopify store, ensure that you only use the appropriate file types. For instance, for your store, incorporate the png and jpeg. JPEG ensures that your images are of high quality and the correct size. At the same time, the PNG offers the best quality and added crucial elements. However, the images on PNG tend to be very big and might lose their image quality.
The JPEG is the most recommended file type for your images as it helps to compress the images. This ensures that your images are high quality and your site can load faster. Another type of image format available is GIF; however, it offers low-quality images and is only recommended for simple images.
5.Incorporate Image Sitemaps
An image sitemap consists of the URL and essential information about the images that various search engines need to index. The image sitemaps are crucial to help your images be recognized easily by Google. Remember that it is essential to ensure that you create a different sitemap for your store’s images. The Sitemaps help Google understand what is on your site, thus improving your SEO efforts.
6.Be Keen on your Thumbnails
A thumbnail is defined as a small representation of a digital image viewed when browsing various images. Remember that even Shopify uses thumbnail images as they are pretty ideal in showcasing products without necessarily taking much space on your store. When designing your thumbnail, it is essential to ensure that the file sizes are not so large. If they are large, it will interfere with the load site of your store. Ensure that the alt text of the thumbnails varies from other alt tags of different images to avoid duplication.
7.Use Image Captions
Photo captions are defined as various cutlines. They are short descriptions essential in describing and elaborating your photos. Although there are not considered a very integral part of image optimization strategy for your Shopify store, they are pretty helpful. Ideally, they help various search engines to scan your website page and understand the meaning of your images. The captions are not crucial to your SEO efforts, but they add value to your alt text.
8.Use Responsive Images
Responsive images are pretty helpful for your SEO efforts. Responsive images work very perfectly on multiple devices and can respond to various changes to the screen resolution. Thus, ensuring that the images are of the proper resolution, screen size, page layout, and orientation is essential.
Conclusion
Shopify image optimization is crucial as it helps to increase the speed of your website, create a good browsing experience, and improve the performance of your site. Thus, ensure that your images look ideal on the desktop and mobile in all your efforts. One crucial tactic you should be keen to observe is compressing your images to minimize the file size but ensuring you retain the quality of the image.
If you want to optimize images for your Shopify store but don’t know the code, Shopify app store has there are many Shopify image optimization apps available.
