Why Compress Pictures for E-Commerce?
The latest statistics from web design service provider Sweor showed that although 75% of consumers reportedly base their judgment of a company’s credibility on the website’s design, 39% of them can decide to stop visiting the website if the images take too long to load or don’t load at all. Nearly half of respondents to their research said that they expect websites to load within two seconds or less.
As a result, online vendors are becoming familiar with terms such as image formats, optimizing images, and image compression. They acknowledge that their site’s page load speeds are affected by the kind of pictures that get posted online.
Pingdom, GTmetrix, Google Page Speed Insights, or KeyCDN are just some free of the website speed test tools you can use to check the page loading speed of your site.
Web-Friendly File Sizes and Formats
Ideal Image Sizes
Online vendors usually make use of three image sizes
- Thumbnails are small, usually ranging from 100 x 100 to 200 x 200 pixels. They are used to direct consumers to a larger image or the main product page.
- Images for product pages are usually at 640 x 640 pixels or 800 x 800 pixels. The larger size is meant to help the consumer have a good look at the product from various angles: front, back, side, and so on.
- Images for the detail or zoom view is usually 800 x 800 pixels or 1,000 x 1,000 pixels. This is especially helpful in showing patterns or surface texture, details on labels, or colors.
Amazon and other big stores have their own specs when it comes to image sizes.
Ideal File Size
File size refers to the amount of space needed to store the image on your server. The latest data from HTTP Archive says that images make up an average 21% of the weight of a webpage.
Images should be kept at 1MB to 2MB to reduce your bounce rate or percentage of visitors who leave a site after viewing only one page. Thumbnails should be just around 70KB.
Ideal File Format
Because image file formats vary in file size, it’s best to know when to use each format:
- JPG – for standard images. It supports a wide variety of colors but may deteriorate in quality after repeated editing and saving.
- PNG – for when you need to show details such as lines, textures, contrast
- GIF – for animated images and ones with only a few colors, like your logo
How Does Compressing Images Work?
Image compression aims to reduce the amount of memory or disk space an image file will occupy on your website and server. Saving an image in a certain format actually determines how compressed they are.
To be a little more technical about it, there are two kinds of compression methods:
Lossless compression
This involves bringing down the size of the file while maintaining the same quality before compression. PNG uses lossless compression.
Lossy compression
This involves getting rid of some bits and pieces of a photo to make its file size smaller. JPG and GIF use lossy compression.
Picture Compressors for e-Commerce
Picture compressors online can optimize your images to improve your website loading speed and raise your rankings in search engine results. They also help you use up less storage space in your server.
The Resizing.app can help you achieve all of that. Simply upload your image to this picture compressor online, resize according to your desired height and width, then choose your preferred file format before saving.