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Why you should upload pictures on your blog or website
I can’t stress enough the importance of uploading captivating pictures for your blog.
It doesn’t matter if you have high quality content. It doesn’t matter if you’ve reached over 5000 words in your blog. If your website looks clunky and boring and bombarded with too much text, your visitors will leave your website.
Your blog or website has to look good. You have to be able to capture their attention. And what better way to do that than to upload pictures!
Posting eye-catching pictures on your website can help lower down your bounce rate and increase customer retention rate. It also makes your post compelling.
Studies have also shown that blog posts with eye-catching images have higher social media shares than posts that are text-heavy. It’s not rocket science. At the end of the day, almost EVERYONE loves aesthetically pleasing content. And this can make a huge difference in helping your website gain more visitors from then on.
When I first started out my blog, one of the biggest mistakes that I had was just focusing on texts. I didn’t care about UI (User Interface) or UX (User Experience) and I didn’t upload pictures because I thought that those would slow down my website. Why would I need pictures when my visitors can just read my all exhaustive blog post right?
As a result of my stubbornness, I was left scratching my head with an annoyingly high bounce-rate. I also didn’t have many social shares. I had few visitors and I almost gave up.
Right until I started tweaking my site and uploading pictures.
Bounce rate improved significantly and my visitors started sharing my posts on social media, especially on Pinterest.
How to properly optimize images for your blog post without losing quality
While you’d want to upload high quality and high resolution images for your blog, you don’t want your site to slow down.
You don’t want to upload low quality images either just for the sake of improving your speed. Low quality or low resolution images will just leave a bad taste in your visitor’s mouth and it will look downright ugly.
Some people, on the other hand, just take whatever photos they can get via google images and upload them on their site. DO NOT DO THIS. I repeat. DO NOT DO THIS.
Just grabbing any pics from google images is not only bad for your site, but you also risk copyright infringement and worse, you risk being demonetized because of stealing content without permission from the photographer or owner of the image.
See: 10 Best Sites for Royalty Free and No Attribution Stock Pictures and Videos
One of the most common mistakes that most beginner makes is that they aren’t optimizing images. Image optimization will ensure that your pictures will look perfect in size and quality without having to sacrifice your site’s loading time.
Of course, you can use professional editing tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to resize, edit and optimize your images. But if you’re only a beginner or someone with knowledge in editing tools, don’t fret!
In this post we’ll talk about…
Top 6 Image Resizers to Optimize Images and Speed Up your Website
1. ImageOptimizer
Imageoptimizer.net is a free website where you can easily resize, compress and optimize your pictures. It’s pretty simple to use and it’s one of my faves because the interface is straightforward.
Simply upload your image, then type in the max width and max height appropriate for your blog, pick image quality and click optimize now.
I wanted to reduce file size so I reduced max width and max height. I also chose “Very Small File Size” from the quality to ensure that I’ll get the smallest possible file size.
As you can see, the optimized file size has been reduced from 160 kb to 94kb!
2. ImageCompressor
Imagecompressor.com or Optimizilla uses the best optimization algorithms to reduce your image size to the smallest possible kb (kilobytes) be while maintaining image quality. It can compress and resize JPEG and PNG images and it will let you upload up to 20 pictures.
As you can see, it was able to reduce image size from 88k to 24k without reducing image quality. That’s 73% reduction in size that will definitely help increase your website’s speed.
3. Tinypng
Tinypng.com had over 1 billion JPEG and PNG images compressed! Some of their most reputable clients are Samsung, Walmart, EA, Hertz and Lego.
Similarly with Optimizilla and ImageOptimizer, what Tinypng does is that it reduces the number of colors of 24 bit PNG files and it converts it to an 8-bit indexed color. To put it simply, the picture file size can be reduced by 70+ %. Not only does it optimize image without sacrificing image quality, but it also saves bandwidth and loading time in your website. The converted images are compatible with all browsers and mobile devices.
Tinypng is free and you can download their wordpress plugin to make things easier for you!
4. SproutSocial
SproutSocial is a free image optimizer specifically designed for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. This tool is perfect for marketers and advertisers who are looking for easy ways to edit their campaigns.
The process is simple. Just drag or upload your image, choose the social media platform you’ll be posting the image to, resize the image and download.
You can choose to upgrade to their pro version where you could connect 5-10 social media profiles depending on your chosen plan. It also helps you schedule and optimize ideal time to post content on your social media.
5. Compressor.io
I personally love Compressor.io‘s interface. It’s sleek, modern, efficient and super easy to use. Like the other websites mentioned above, Compressor.io does the trick of optimizing images to reduce file size. It doesn’t only optimize png and jpeg files though, but it also optimizes gifs, svg, and webp files.
You can choose between “lossy” or “lossless” compression. Lossy reduces file size by modifying the pixels of an image. Lossless on the other hand doesn’t modify the pixels but it removes image metadata to reduce file size.
Just drop or upload the pic to be optimized and click on lossy/lossless/custom.
Choosing the lossy option reduced my file size to a whopping 52kb from 212 kb. That’s a reduction of almost 75%. It’s pretty impressive.
6. Kraken.io
Kraken.io is another impressive and straightforward picture optimizer. It does the tricks as the websites mentioned above but its main difference is that you can import images from dropbox, google drive, or a zip file containing pictures from your computer.
It also allows you to choose between Lossy, Lossless or Expert.
Their free interface has a file limit of 1mb but you could opt to upgrade to their PRO version where you could resize your image as well.
From the original size of 84.42 kb it managed to resize it to 26 kb.
You can share your pictures on twitter and facebook or save files in a ziparchive to your Dropbox.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to post your questions or leave a comment below. Thank you!
