Search engines rely on meta data like alternative (alt) text and filenames to u brazil mobile database nderstand images. Including descriptive, keyword-rich alt text improves accessibility and increases your chances of appearing in Google Image Search results.
Alt text is a text description of an image that is displayed if the image fails to load, and is also read by search engines. Properly filled in alt text with relevant keywords helps Google understand what the image is about and how it relates to the content of the page. This improves the context and relevance of the page for given search queries. The file name of the image can also contain keywords and help search engines understand the context. Instead of generic names like “obrazek1.jpg”, use descriptive names, such as “damske-kozene-lodicky-cerne.jpg”.
5 Best Practices for Optimizing Images in WordPress
When optimizing images for WordPress, following best practices will ensure that your website is visually appealing and high-performing. Let’s explore these basic steps in detail.
1. Choose the right image formats for quality and performance
Not all image formats perform equally well, so choosing the right one depends on your content and optimization goals. Here’s a quick overview of your options:
- JPEG : Ideal for photographs and detailed visuals, it offers excellent compressi claire hayes director of marketing on with minimal loss of quality.
- PNG: Best for graphics requiring transparency, although it has a larger file size compared to JPEG.
- SVG: Ideal for logos or icons due to its scalability and low size.
- WebP and AVIF : Modern formats designed for superior compression and singapore data quality, significantly reducing file sizes compared to JPEG and PNG. These formats are supported by most browsers and are becoming the new standard for web images.
2. Resize and compress images before sending
Uploading oversized images is a very common mistake in WordPress that negatively impacts page loading speed. The key is to ensure that the dimensions of the uploaded images match the dimensions required by your template (theme) or specific blog post layout as closely as possible. For example, if your blog post displays images with a maximum width of 800 pixels, there is absolutely no point in uploading an image that is 3,000 pixels wide. WordPress will reduce such an image to display on the page, but the user’s browser still has to download the entire large file, which unnecessarily increases loading time. The ideal procedure is therefore to reduce the image to optimal dimensions using a graphic editor before uploading it to WordPress, which will significantly reduce its size and improve website performance.
Tools like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, or WordPress plugins, which we’ll talk about in a moment, help reduce file sizes while maintaining visual quality. For bulk resizing, use tools like Photoshop or GIMP.
3. Add descriptive alt text and metadata
Alt text serves several purposes. It is used to:
- Improves accessibility for screen readers.
- It supports SEO by helping search engines understand the context of the image.
- Improves the findability of your website through Google image search.
A good example of alt text: “Golden Retriever puppy playing with a ball on the grass”
Bad alt text example: “Dog”
To further optimize your images for search engines, also use descriptive file names and include relevant keywords. However, there’s no need to overdo it.
4. Enable lazy loading
Lazy loading delays loading off-screen images until a website visitor scrolls down to them. This increases website speed because less data needs to be loaded at the beginning.
Fortunately, WordPress includes a built-in lazy loading feature, so you can enable this feature without any additional plugins.
5. Optimize thumbnails and responsive images
WordPress automatically generates multiple image preview sizes (including thumbnails), which is useful for responsive design, but it can lead to unnecessary data growth in the media library. Therefore, it is a good idea to check your theme (template) settings and make sure that only the image sizes that you actually use are generated. This will prevent unnecessary copies of images from being stored and save space on the server. Responsive image display in WordPress ensures that the optimal image size is loaded for different screen resolutions, but this behavior can be further improved by adjusting the so-called “breakpoints” either directly in the theme code or using specialized plugins. By adjusting the breakpoints, you can more precisely define at which resolutions each image size should be loaded, thereby achieving even better optimization for different devices and avoiding unnecessary downloading of too large images on smaller displays.