Your website won’t rank because of too many images

By Queen Nwabueze

I came to disrupt you with this one. Can you guess the first put off anytime I visit a website? The gallery session! That’s right!! It’s the gallery!!! And guess what? While it is my first put off, it is one of Google’s biggest put offs too. You know why? Because it won’t let you rank.

Today’s teaching comes with the high hopes that by the time you are done reading, you will stop the malpractice of dedicating a whole session of your website to mere photos – the one you call, Gallery.

Yes indeed, you should begin to prune out those lazy loading images from your website which is what has been messing up all your effort to rank in Google and other search engines. You read right! Too many photos have been one of your problems to rank on the no. 1 page of the SERPs.

Here in Nigeria, the ignorant practice is that we build a site, load it with all manner of images and as if that isn’t enough, we dedicate a full session to archiving events photos and videos which when pooled together could read in terabytes, making your website inherit technical enemies.

People can’t find you on Google because of your pack of photos. How so? It makes your site as lazy as a sloth. The crawlers take their leave as a result; real users resort to leave too because of it. No searcher has the time to waste on a website that won’t load with the speed of light.

What I am saying is simple and I just hope you are getting it. Take for instance the phone you use. Haven’t you noticed that when you pack the innocent device with too many pictures, you would click a thing and it takes centuries to appear? In short, when you newly acquired the phone versus now, can you compare the load time? It, in fact, gets to a point where the phone starts threatening that you delete photos and other heavy files or take whatever comes next.

Brothers and sisters, site loading speed is a ranking factor too. If you jam-pack your site with images, you would have robbed yourself of the opportunity to rank.

Maybe you have gotten every other technicalities right such as mobile friendliness, fixed broken links etc. but too many images remain your arch enemy. You upload them thinking you are helping your stakeholders keep up with your organisational happenings whereas it’s the reason your site has never appeared on Google unless the web address is keyed in directly to Google’s search box.

I won’t dwell so much on this topic. I’d rather you spend the time you would have used in reading more of this piece to proceed to improving your website’s technical performance. Go ahead! Start deleting all those lazy events and company photos of yours. Also, prune out so-called accompanying images and graphics in your homepage and other sessions. You can take them anywhere else but your website.

Besides, those images are not even blog or website worthy as they serve NOT the interest of your readers.