Why Should You Optimize Images for the Web?
“More visual content!” — users say.
“More visual content!” — Google echoes.
Images carry the most weight on a website (in 9 out of 10 cases).
How to deal with this?
And should anything be done about it?
Let’s break this down.
Everyone wants more users to find their website on Google search results. To get to top positions, you have to reckon with Google Core Web Vitals.
One of the metrics included in the Core Web Vitals is the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or, simply put, the average loading time of the main content found on your web pages. The main content includes both — media and text. Another media-related metric is the First Contentful Paint (FCP). It actually shows when your users see the first real content on your website.
The sore point is that a good LCP should be under 2.5 sec, whereas a good FCP — under 1.8 sec.
So, have you guessed where I’m going with this? It looks like without optimizing one of the largest parts of your website — images, you can’t get the score and will simply fail to reach the top positions on Google.
Knowing what your users want, you only need to know what Google wants in order to be fully successful. Here is a fresh guide on how to optimize images for SEO including:
- basic requirements for images in 2022: format, quality, size;
- and how to meet those requirements through working on the: file name, storage, placement, backlinks, Alt meta tag, sitemap, markup, and a few other factors.
