There are certain best practices that we encourage our clients to use when they’re uploading images for their websites. Images can play a huge part in the loading speed and functioning of your website, so taking the steps to ensure that your images are web-ready can do a lot for your website’s performance and SEO.
ShortPixel and Cloudflare Enterprise
By default, these programs are already running on your Valerian-hosted website.
ShortPixel reduces the size of your images and ensures that they are the proper size (maximum of 2000 pixels in width for full-width photos). This helps with loading speeds (an important SEO metric), but it’s also something your website visitors will notice.
Cloudflare converts your images in the cloud to WebP or new formats. This also helps with performance and user experience.
How to optimize your images before you upload
There are some more steps you can take to optimize or compress your image prior to uploading that will help our built-in tools go even further.
JPEGmini
An application that you install on your computer, JPEGmini will take an image file and reduce its size without sacrificing image quality. Your image file will be smaller and easier to load, but it won’t be pixelated or distorted in any way.
If you make a lot of content changes to your website or if you upload videos often, we recommend buying this app. It’s $59/year, and although the license is valid after that year, you’ll have to pay again after a year for continued updates.
TinyPNG
If you’re looking for a free app to do the same thing, we recommend TinyPNG. You can process up to 20 images at a time, download them once they are resized, and then upload them to your Media Library.
One drawback to this free tool: there is a 5 MB limit, so your image has to be smaller even before you upload it.
❌ We don’t recommend…
If you have photos from a photographer, you likely won’t want to ever upload them straight to your website. Photos straight from a photographer tend to be gigantic files, sometimes upwards of 50 MB for one file. Unless your photographer has told you the photos are web-ready, you should always use a tool to reduce the file size before uploading. In fact, a lot of times, you’ll receive an error message if you try to upload a file of that size to your Media Library. It’s best to upload files with sizes in KBs or in the 1–2 MB range.
Again, this is important for SEO, performance, and your visitors’ overall experience.