On-page optimisation cont...

A picture says a thousand words as the saying goes, and it’s right, images are a great way to attract your customers and hold their interest on your website.

However, it’s easy to overlook the fact that placing large images on your site can slow it down to a crawl, especially on mobile, and therefore resulting in a poor user experience.

Limiting the size of the image file you upload, as well as using compression tools is an easy fix to help overcome this problem and in the process optimise them for your site.

One further step you should take is to edit them to the appropriate dimensions, which will help optimise those images further.

Touching on metadata for a second in relation to images, always make sure your image file names are keyword-friendly and your alt text for each image is descriptive will help even further.

These enhancements make your site more searchable by Google, more user-friendly and load a lot faster.

This is growing in importance for Google as they see the performance of websites and how fast they load as a major issue as far as user experience is concerned.

They are actively seeking to resolve the problem and doing something about it, much in the same way they did with forcing positive change to SSL certificates and mobile-friendly websites.

They have given notice that As of May 2021 they plan to introduce Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor.

This is a metric that Google has used as part of the Search console tool, and focuses primarily on website loading speeds and user experience using metrics such as LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).

This is an extract from a blog on the site - On-page SEO 5 simple steps to get started