Optimizing your website for your users is critical to generating more leads and customers. A website that isn’t optimized for SEO won’t rank high and may create a poor customer experience. If your website takes two extra seconds to load, your bounce rate increases by 38%.
Search engine optimization takes more than including keywords on your website and calling it a day. For example, having large image files on your website can slow down your page’s load time. But, conversion tools can help you optimize your web images to load faster.
How do you use conversion tools to get your website’s images to the optimal size? Read on to learn the basics of using online image conversion tools to create optimized images.
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How to Maintain Image Quality
When users visit your website, they don’t want to see low-quality photos. It makes your business look unprofessional. But when reducing file sizes, you must remove data from your image and reduce the quality.
So you have to find a balance between the smallest file size and the quality. Many free and paid tools reduce file size through a process called compression. You can upload your photo to these tools, adjust the quality, then save it.
There are two types of compression, lossy and lossless. Lossy compression can reduce a lot of file size, but you lose data. Lossless compresses data, so you don’t lose it, but it requires starting with an uncompressed file.
You have to experiment with compression rates to get the best results. A higher compression rate gives a smaller file but lower quality. Then a lower compression rate returns a higher quality image and a larger file.
Choose the Correct File Format
The file type is the second factor you have to balance with compression. Most conversion tools will give you several file options to save your images. The most common are PNG, JPEG, and GIFs.
The PNG file type produces high-quality images and was made for lossless compression but can also use lossy compression. JPEGs are easy to work with to balance quality and file size. GIFs can only use lossless compression.
Converting Video to a GIF
GIFs are animated images that can be made from multiple images or videos. Including GIFs on your website can help you convey your message to visitors. GIFs are smaller files than full videos so they are easier on your website’s load time.
Converting video to GIF works similarly to converting images. You will need to upload your video to a conversion tool. Then use the tools to select the part of the video you want to turn into a GIF.
Compressing GIFs also takes some experimentation to get the right file size. Also, make sure you start with a high-quality video since GIFs can only be created with lossless compression.
How to Resize Your Images
Improperly sized images on your site also inflate the load time and reduce image quality. But you will likely need to change the image size to get the right fit.
Online image conversion tools often provide standard image sizes used by websites and social media to resize your images. You can use a preset or type in your exact dimensions.
Keep in mind your image’s aspect ratio when reducing image size. If you don’t keep the same ratio, your image will be distorted.
If you need to get an image to fit a certain size, you can crop it. Cropping will lose part of the image but will retain quality.
Conversion Tools Make Optimizing Your Online Images Easy
Page load time is one of the factors that Google uses to rank web pages. When reducing file sizes, you have to be careful not to sacrifice quality. Conversion tools can help you resize your images and compress files without sacrificing quality if you take the time to experiment with them.
Are you looking for more ways to improve your website performance after optimizing your images? Check out our website for more SEO tips.