Images are essential for any E-Commerce website, as they showcase your products and attract customers. However, images can also slow down your website, affecting your SEO, user experience, and conversions. How can you optimize images for faster E-Commerce load times using CMS analytics and reporting tools? Here are some tips to help you.
Before you start optimizing your images, you need to know how they affect your website speed and performance. You can use CMS analytics and reporting tools, such as Google Analytics, to measure your page load time, bounce rate, and conversion rate. You can also use tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to identify the images that are causing the most delays and issues. These tools will give you suggestions on how to improve your image optimization.
Certainly! Effectively optimizing images is pivotal for website performance. Prioritizing impact of images on page load time, bounce rate, and conversion rate through CMS analytics and tools like Google Analytics is a strategic approach. Tools such as PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom aid in identifying and addressing specific image-related issues. This holistic approach to image optimization contributes significantly to a seamless user experience and improved website core web vitals.
Especially in Europe where there are multiple languages, cultures and user behaviours, analysing the performance of different assets (image vs Video) and Desktop vs Mobile assets is very important. Also, because some languages are longer than others, it’s also very important to ensure the image actually serves the expected purpose despite these differences - this can be tested with content analytics (google, adobe & contentsquare). And of course, QA/UAT is needed before the launch every time!
Here is the thing: Wordpress offers you many free plugins to compress and change format to webp so images will be max 300kb. Second thing: CDN as name says is delivery mechanism which decrease load (cpu, memory...) from origin server allowing us to serve content to more visitors without interruption and for long distance locations( example: origin is in europe and visitor is in Japan). In second case it speeds up a bit delivering but it doesnt help you much if you are in europe ( then it will take more time since it creates one or more requests to the CDN server). Lazy load can be really good improvement for images if you are using large images. Sizing is also crucial if its properly done....
Start with page loading speed. You can use tools like Google Page Speed Insight or GTMetrix to analyze how fast a page loads and what exact factors are responsible for low page speed. In GTMetrix, you can see a Waterfall graph to analyze what exact images are causing the issue. Another tool you can use is Screaming Frog. Crawl a website and see the image size of all the images in one go. This way you can find images with greater sizes causing the page speed low. If a page loads slowly, it'll cause a bad user experience resulting in low sales.
To speed up e-commerce load times through image optimization, you need to combine effective image optimization strategies with the use of CMS analytics and reporting tools. Below is a short checklist for optimizing images. Analyze Current Performance: Identify Large or Unoptimized Images: Resize Images: Compress Images: Use Lazy Loading: Implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Optimize for Mobile: Use Appropriate Image Formats: Review CMS Plugins and Extensions: Regularly Monitor and Optimize: Enjoy, and happy optimizing.
One of the easiest ways to optimize your images is to choose the right format for your E-Commerce website. There are different types of image formats, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, and WebP, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. For example, JPEG is good for photos and complex images, while PNG is good for logos and icons. GIF is good for animations, while SVG is good for vector graphics. WebP is a newer format that can reduce the file size of images without compromising the quality. You can use CMS tools, such as WordPress plugins, to convert your images to the best format for your website.
Image format not only helps you save the load time but also enhances the websites’ user experience. WordPress hooks can be utilised to filter the image editor output mapping. There are a number of Plugins that can help you achieve the complex task of converting your image format.
Highlight the need to balance image quality and file size to avoid visual artifacts and maintain a positive user experience during the optimization process.
WebP is the best image format for eCommerce stores as it will make your page and your images load faster on your website. Page Speed is key for your SEO, and WebP images can, in fact, optimize your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). LCP is one of Google’s leading ranking signals. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge support WebP format.
Since Salesforce Commerce Cloud supports Google's WebP format, we were able to cut image size by ±25%. It's tricky to setup but worth it.
Newer image formats more or less have benefits over the previous ones, especially in the page load speed and compatibility with new media devices. A CMS that can support all image formats and also keep updating their tools to support new image formats is also really important.
Another way to optimize your images is to resize and compress them to reduce their file size and dimensions. You can use CMS tools, such as Shopify apps, to resize your images according to your website layout and design. You can also use CMS tools, such as Squarespace plugins, to compress your images without losing their quality. Compressing your images can reduce their file size by up to 90%, which can significantly improve your website speed and performance.
Highlight the importance of balancing image compression for reduced file size with preserving acceptable image quality to avoid potential visual drawbacks.
While doing graphics work, add this checklist to your designer's tasks to compress the image sizes before uploading to the website. But if they are already uploaded you can use plugins to get the job done. In Shopify, you can use apps like Image Optimizer or Avada SEO to compress the images. While doing this keep in mind to create a balance between compression and user experience.
A great free way to optimize all of your images is to upload them to a free tool like tinypng.com and download compressed images that are the same quality. This will increase your website performance without decreasing quality.
Having strict requirements for the assets used on the website can make the page load speed consistent so the users get excellent site-experience every single time they browse it. Using 3rd party plugins also puts privacy risks ask there might be embargo on some assets - the quality may be affected as well because of 3rd party plugins. The best way is to ensure designers are making sure they stick to the requirements and constant checks are done.
Lazy loading and caching are two techniques that can optimize your images by loading them only when they are needed or storing them in the browser for faster access. Lazy loading means that your images will only load when the user scrolls to them, instead of loading all the images at once. This can save bandwidth and improve your website speed and user experience. Caching means that your images will be stored in the browser's cache, so that they don't have to be downloaded again when the user revisits your website. This can reduce the server load and improve your website performance. You can use CMS tools, such as Drupal modules, to implement lazy loading and caching for your images.
I’ve used a few cache and load optimization plug ins for Wordpress, most of them have price-fenced premium features. Some of them are spammy.
Lazy loading and caching offer benefits, like bandwidth savings and improved speed. However, it's crucial to be aware of potential downsides, such as delayed image rendering and challenges in updating content.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that can deliver your images and other content to your users faster and more efficiently. A CDN can reduce the distance between your users and your images, which can improve your website speed and performance. You can use CMS tools, such as Magento extensions, to integrate your website with a CDN service, such as Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or Akamai. You can also optimize your server by upgrading your hosting plan, enabling compression, and using HTTPS.
Using CDN can enhance image and content delivery speed. CDNs reduce the distance between users and images, positively impacting website performance. CDN service, like Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, or Akamai, can be facilitated through CMS tools such as Magento extensions. Additionally, optimizing server performance through hosting upgrades, compression, and HTTPS usage contributes to an overall improved user experience.
The last step to optimize your images is to test and monitor your image optimization results and impact. You can use CMS analytics and reporting tools, such as Google Analytics, to track your website speed, performance, and conversions before and after optimizing your images. You can also use tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom to measure your image optimization score and get feedback on how to improve it. You can also use tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Moz to monitor your SEO and ranking changes after optimizing your images.
Monitoring image optimisation and reacting to long page speeds is really important as there could be human errors while exporting the images! These reports should be daily at the least and the business teams should have backup images/assets just in case!
Testing and monitoring are crucial for assessing image optimization success. CMS analytics tools, including Google Analytics, help track website speed, performance, and conversions pre- and post-optimization. Utilizing PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom provides valuable image optimization scores and improvement suggestions. Monitoring SEO changes can be done through tools like Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, or Moz. This comprehensive approach ensures ongoing assessment and refinement of image optimization strategies for sustained impact.
The photos of the products in an e-commerce must be clean, ideally with a white background, and have the same dimensions. Create a template in #Canva with the dimensions you consider satisfactory to showcase your products and use it for all your products. What you will gain is uniformity and clarity across all product lists, product categories, and carousels etc. A good solution is to choose the JPEG format for product images because they are lighter and open correctly in all browsers. Alexandros Theocharis
Use a Digital Asset management system that can efficiently talk to your PIM with the request to size and dimensions required for the the request. Using the same sized image for thumbnail to a wide page banner is a wrong idea. There are only a handful of tool that do this dynamicaly. In my experience we have used cloudinary which dynamicaly reads the loaded page on a browser and then saves the full size images to its CDN library and the pushes back the compressed and only the required size back on to the next visitor. So your site gets optimized on every load and it generates a repository of multiple sizes of your single image to use for multiple browser sizes and devices.
We are using headless solutions layered above our ecommerce infrastructure. A dedicated front end with in built CDN and caching capabilities will load faster than a monolith architecture. The downside is ensuring you have the skillset to manage the ‘head’.
Short answer: you can't without an experienced Software Engineer. First of all, the question is poorly formulated. You can NOT optimize with an analyzing or reporting tool. Correctly used, the tools could only tell you where to optimize. After that, a Software Engineer can implement a fail-proof solution. If you don't have the budget for an Engineer, you could use cloud-based solutions like CDNs, but these are never as performant as a tailored implementation.