Have you ever been to a boutique which has neither garment racks nor mannequins to display their merchandise on?
If there’s such a place, it has probably closed down or gone broke a long time ago.
No matter how good their product line is, any store that doesn’t value what their customers see will suffer the same fate.
Going to online stores, the equivalent of clothing racks and mannequins on this platform are product images.
Optimising your product images will drive customer engagement on your site and increase its conversion rate.
Words alone won’t sell your product because customers prefer to see it in action.
They stop and look at a picture-driven product page, focusing on the details of each photo while glancing at the text content only to check if the description matches what they see in the pictures.
Here are some helpful tips on how to optimise your website images the right way.
Compress images
It’s one thing to have high-quality images, it’s another thing to load them fast on your website.
Downloading large image files, especially to mobile devices, is quite a challenge for many users.
Compress your images to eliminate that problem and speed up your page load time.
You’ll find an array of image editing tools online such as PicResize, PicMonkey and FastStone, among others.
Use the right file type
Aside from size, an image file’s format will affect the performance of your website on desktop computers and mobile devices.
Three of the most common types of image files are JPG, GIF and PNG, but you can’t just eeny, meeny, miny, moe because there’s a slight difference between them.
- JPG is the standard format for Internet images as it can compress without compromising a picture’s quality.
- GIF images are smaller than their JPG counterparts and associated with animation and small vector graphic files.
- PNG is the largest type of image file, and thus ideal for large colourful images.
Employ a digital asset management system
Digital asset management (DAM) is the process of storing and organising photos, videos and other digital files in a centralised library for easy retrieval and sharing.
Once a user requests an image on your website, your DAM system will locate and retrieve it from the library, and then automatically convert it into the format and size required by the user’s device.
Image optimisation is an important aspect of building a responsive eCommerce website.
When optimised the right way, your product images can easily draw the attention of first-time visitors to your site, quickly turning them into loyal customers.
What are you doing to get potential customers to notice your product images?
