E-commerce Product Image Optimization Tips

While E-Commerce Product Images quality is certainly important for creating great Product Photography, image optimization is the real secret to building a successful online store.

In a world of instant gratification, it’s crucial for businesses to keep the customer experience moving with a fast-loading E-commerce website. Research shows that if an e-commerce site loads slower than expected, visitors are less likely to make a purchase. Often, the main culprits of a slow website are large, under-optimized E-Commerce Product Images. Learning how to optimize images can yield big rewards, from reducing site load times to enhancing your brand to attracting shoppers perusing Google images.

What is Product Image Optimization?

Product Image Optimization is minimizing the file size of your images without losing their quality to keep your page load times as fast as possible. Making your banners and product photos rank high on Google and other image search engines is another aspect of image SEO.

Image optimization means ensuring your images look flawless on desktop and mobile. And that they don’t hinder web performance. Product Image Optimization aims to produce high-quality photographs with the smallest possible file size. Here, three key components are involved:

Image file size (JPEG vs. PNG vs. WEBP images)
Image compression level
Image height and width

You can decrease the size of the image and enhance website performance by striking a balance between the three.

Why do we have to optimize product images for e-commerce?

Pages take longer to load because E-Commerce Product Images make up the majority of the page size. According to data from HTTP Archive, unoptimized Ecommerce Product Photos often account for 75% of the weight of a webpage. The effectiveness of your website may suffer as a result. (imagify)

A key component of effective e-commerce site design is E-Commerce Pictures optimization, which results in the following advantages:

Improved website speed

Product Image Optimization for web and mobile exists to make web pages load faster. They create a better browsing experience for shoppers. Should there be a mere two-second delay in your page speed, your bounce rate can increase by 103%. (imagify)

Page speed is how fast content on your page loads. It’s often described as:

Page load time, or the time it takes to display the content on your page.
The time it takes for your browser to get the first byte of data from your webserver is known as the “time to first byte” or “TTFB” parameter.

Google has claimed that one of the factors utilized by its algorithm to rank pages is site speed. According to research from Moz, when evaluating page speed, Google may take into account latency to the first byte in particular. A sluggish page results in fewer pages being crawled by search engines using their crawl budget, which might harm your indexing.

Better browsing experience

The user experience of a visitor depends on page speed. Delays as small as 1/10th of a second can be felt by people. Anything beyond that doesn’t feel “immediate” to me. One second is all it takes for a person’s mental process to be disrupted.

We discovered that 10% of users abandon a page for every additional second it takes to load. (imagify)

Longer loading times are associated with higher bounce rates and shorter average time on the page. The user experience would be enhanced if page load times are lowered even by a single second. Search engine rankings are positively impacted by improved user engagement and interactions with your site, which can increase engagement, conversions, and customer retention.

Improved search performance

E-Commerce Product Images that have been optimized make it easier for users and search engines to understand your website and to find your information online. According to recent research, 32% of Google search searches yield photos. The ability to rank your E-Commerce Pictures in Google’s Image Search can increase traffic to your website and help you establish your brand.

Additionally, visual search is becoming increasingly significant, as seen by Google’s recent introduction of a new search feature that mixes text and images into a single query. Visual search is the new technology that consumers in Generation Z and Millennials want the most, at 62%.

Reduce the Refund/Return Rate

Unlike shopping in a physical boutique, online browsing means you can’t feel or touch a product. You can’t have it in your hand: all you have are E-Commerce Product Images and testimonials from previous clients. That’s why high-quality and relevant E-Commerce Product Images are crucial to avoid disappointments and refunds.

The key is to provide your clients with a clear and honest E-Commerce Product Images of what they expect to receive.

Generate More Sales, Enhance Your Brand Credibility and Keep the Visitor Engaged

The look and feel of the page is swiftly scanned by visitors to see whether it meets their search criteria. You want to keep them there as long as possible so they can browse. By providing consumers with a more educational and alluring shopping experience, optimized E-Commerce Product Images persuade customers to buy.

“87.6% of respondents considered the product image as the key elements of the shopping experience” (imagify)

Source: Marketing Charts

Based on a survey of 1,372 US online shoppers, the majority of whom shop online at least once every 2 weeks
Q: “In your opinion, what makes a great online shopping experience? Select all that apply.”

Etsy also questioned their consumers about the factors that most affected their decision to buy. They discovered, however, that the picture quality was much more crucial than the price itself. 90% of customers rated the photos’ quality as “very important” or “very significant” while making a purchase. (imagify)

Source: Etsy

Boost SEO Efforts and Get More Traffic with Social Shareability

You may increase traffic from Google Photos by delivering SEO-optimized E-Commerce Product Images. Google needs to locate descriptive alt text, captions, titles, and pertinent file names when it crawls your website. You should try to rank in Google for your keyword.

And last, a video or E-Commerce Product Images can go viral more quickly than a line of words. Good E-Commerce Product Photography increases the likelihood that it will be shared on social media by 40%, according to HubSpot. You may boost brand awareness and receive free advertising.

Now that you know, put your conversion strategy’s focus on the E-Commerce Product Images. Let’s discuss E-Commerce Best Practices that can assist maintain the operation of your online store, along with powerful marketing strategies for enhancing your product photos.

See more» Why Product Images are so important in E-commerce

Strategies to make you product images outstanding

Although having a single unoptimized image of a product is still sufficient to seal the sale, optimized photos are essential for conversions and brand identity. To develop top-notch E-Commerce Product Images before posting them, use the following 8 E-Commerce Product Photography and marketing best practices.

#1 Serve High-quality Product Images

This one may seem apparent, but far too many online shops continue to use E-Commerce Product Images that are either blurry or too small to allow customers to make purchasing decisions. Unbelievably, this is the same in the case below.

Which item appeals to you more, and which would you feel inclined to order?

#2 Provide Context with Lifestyle and Inspiring Images

A prospective bride should be able to envision her bridesmaids wearing the dresses on the big day if she is looking for bridesmaid dresses. The E-Commerce Product Images below serve as inspiration because it displays how the dresses seem when the bride is in the center of the group:

#3 Use a Consistent Background

Add a consistent image background matching your branding compliance: same display, same colors, and same image variants. Addictbeauty, an online cosmetics store, stays consistent on the product E-Commerce Product Images.

E-commerce Product Image Optimization Tips — Source: a-ddictbeauty

#4 Include The Different Variants Available

A shopper may like the design of a dress but not the color presented in the main E-Commerce Product Images. In that case, don’t lose her attention and offer some color selectors so she can project himself with the right color.

Amazon online shop lets you choose the color and displays all the layouts available before purchasing a dress. They put themselves in a buyer’s shoes.

#5 Show Real Customer Images

Don’t forget real customer images from the customer community. Real product images from the customer community provide people with inspiration and thus support their imagination. Users can get an impression of how they would look with the product. True to the motto “a product that can not be seen can not be sold”.

#6 Show The Right Proportion Image

If you are selling a product and your Unique Selling Proposition says that it’s the smallest product on the market, you should highlight it on the E-Commerce Product Images.

For example, below shows the difference between Bracelets for adults and bracelets for children:

#7 Use Proper Lighting and Retouch E-Commerce Product Images

Photo editing is another important player in grabbing the attention of online shoppers. While they don’t want fake promises, they also want to see attractive photos with accurate colors.

#8 Add Images from Multiple Angles to Show Important Details: Zoom and 360° View

Online shoppers must be able to zoom in on the goods and obtain a 360-degree view to view it from every angle. Consumers are constantly seeking a visually appealing and engaging buying experience.

A recent study from ElasticPath showed that product pages with 360° E-Commerce Product Images saw the following improvements:

Bounce rates decreased by 27% (imagify)
Add-to-cart rates increased by 35 % (imagify)
Conversion rates increased by 22 % (imagify)

The entire online purchasing experience for firms that also have a physical presence should resemble how engaging their in-store experience is. These possibilities are specifically provided by zooms and 360-degree E-Commerce Product Images.

E-commerce Product Image Optimization: The best practices

#1 Use concise and direct image names

Keeping the default file names that your camera provides when you post photographs to your website is quite simple. However, including pertinent keywords will help your website rank on search engines when it comes to image SEO.

For E-Commerce Product Images to be optimized, descriptive, keyword-rich file names must be created. Search engines read both the content and the file names of the images on your website.

#2 Optimize your alt attributes carefully

When a browser is unable to properly render pictures, alt attributes serve as a text substitute. They are employed for web accessibility as well. If you hover your mouse over an image, the alt attribute text will be visible even after it has been produced (depending on your browser settings).

Your website’s alt property improves its SEO value. You can improve your search engine ranking by giving the photos on your website adequate alt attributes that contain pertinent keywords. In fact, using alt attributes is likely the greatest method to ensure that your e-commerce products appear in Google images and web search results.

Let’s examine the alt attribute’s source code.

The number one priority when it comes to image optimization is to fill out the alt attribute for each product image on your site.

Here are some simple rules for alt attributes:

Describe your E-Commerce Product Images in plain language, just like you did for your image file names.
If you sell products that have model numbers or serial numbers, use them in your alt attributes.
Don’t stuff your alt attributes full of keywords (e.g. alt=”ford mustang muscle car buy now cheap best price on sale”).
Don’t use alt attributes for decorative images. Search engines may penalize you for over-optimization.

Finally, do a sanity check from time to time. View the source of your web pages and check to see if your alt attributes are filled out properly. You’ll be surprised by what you miss when you’re moving at the speed of entrepreneurship.

#3 Choose your image dimensions and product angles wisely

It’s common practice to show multiple angles of your product.

If eight images per product sound like a lot, keep in mind that shoppers want to see products from every angle: front, back, top, bottom, and so on. They want to verify quality and functionality. They want to know which ports a gadget has or check whether a pattern is only on the front of a pillow. So use the eight E-Commerce Pictures of your product wisely, to tell the full story of what a product is and what it can do.

Do not, under any circumstances, upload the largest image to your webpage and then just reduce its size using source code. Due to the increased file size of the related image, this will prolong the time it takes for your website to load.

Instead, display a smaller version of the E-Commerce Product Images on the page and give users the choice to view a larger version in a pop-up or on another page. Advice: Discover how to use jQuery image zoom to make product photos zoomable in your theme.

#4 Resize your images

Consider this:

Nearly 50% of consumers won’t wait even three seconds for an e-commerce site to load.
Globally, the average page load time is actually increasing.
Amazon found that if its pages were to slow down by just one second, it would lose $1.6 billion a year.
Google uses page load time as a ranking factor in its algorithm.

If you have E-Commerce Product Images that slowly “drool” down the screen and take more than 15 seconds to load? Well, you can kiss that prospective customer goodbye!

So, what can you do? If you can decrease the size of the E-Commerce Product Images files on your webpage and increase page load speed, fewer people who visit your site will click away. There are numerous online tools you can use for image editing. For instance: Adobe, PicMonkey, PIXLR, Canva, GIMP,…

For E-Commerce Product Images, a good rule of thumb is to try to keep your image file size below 70 kilobytes. That can be difficult at times, especially for larger images.

#5 Optimize your thumbnails

Thumbnail E-Commerce Product Images are commonly used on e-commerce websites, particularly on category pages. They quickly display things without consuming a lot of space.

Thumbnails are fantastic, but use caution—they can murder you quietly. the victim Your webpage loads quickly. Typically, thumbnails are displayed at pivotal times during the shopping experience. You can lose a potential consumer if they are slowing down the loading of your category pages.

What can you do, then?

Reduce the size of your thumbnail files as much as you can. Here, it could be worthwhile to sacrifice quality for a smaller file size. Keep in mind that the total effect of your thumbnails will significantly affect how quickly your page loads.

To avoid using the same text twice for the same image in different sizes, vary the alt property wording. Make your alt text incredibly distinctive, in fact. The last thing you need is for the larger image to get indexed rather than the thumbnail. One may argue against using any alt text at all.

#6 Use image sitemaps

If your site uses Javascript galleries, image pop-ups, or other “flashy” ways to improve the overall shopping experience, image sitemaps will help get your E-Commerce Product Images noticed by Google.

Web crawlers can’t crawl images that are not called out specifically in the webpage source code. So, in order to let crawlers know about unidentified images, you must list their location in an image sitemap.

Google has a number of guidelines for publishing images that could raise the SERP ranking of your website. Additionally, by providing Google with more details about the E-Commerce Product Images on your website through Google sitemaps, you can make it easier for Google to find more of your E-Commerce Pictures than it otherwise would.

Although using sitemaps isn’t a guarantee that Google will index your images, it is unquestionably a step in the right direction for image SEO. There are numerous recommendations in Google Webmaster Tools for formatting your sitemap properly.

You must provide precise tags for each of your E-Commerce Product Images. Additionally, a different sitemap can be made just to list photos. In any sitemaps you have or will build, it’s crucial to include all the relevant information while using precise tags. Use these instructions to create a sitemap that includes E-Commerce Product Images information, as recommended by Google.

#7 Beware of decorative images

Websites frequently contain a variety of ornamental images, including backgrounds, buttons, and borders. Any graphic that isn’t directly tied to a product is probably considered ornamental.

Even having ornamental images can greatly enhance a web page’s aesthetic appeal, they might cause a big total file size and sluggish load times. As a result, you might want to think about looking more closely at your decorative photos to ensure that they won’t hinder the potential of your website to convert visitors into consumers.

Use a template that reduces file sizes and make sure to verify the file sizes of all the ornamental images on your website.

The following advice can help you make your ornamental graphics smaller in file size:

Create simple patterns or border graphics as PNG-8 or GIF files. Beautiful photos can be made that are only a few hundred bytes in size.
Whenever possible, generate colored areas using CSS rather than pictures. To the greatest extent possible, replace any decorative pictures with CSS styling.
Examine the enormous wallpaper-style background image closely. Those files may be enormous. As far as you can without losing image quality, reduce them.

Cutting out the center of the backdrop image and making it a flat color or even translucent is one method you can use to reduce the size of your background image. The file size may significantly drop as a result.

#8 Use caution when using content delivery networks (CDNs)

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a go-to place to host images and other media files. They can increase your page load speeds and help solve bandwidth issues.

By uploading your photos to a CDN, you are probably shifting the file from your domain to the CDN’s domain. Therefore, when someone connects to your E-Commerce Product Images, they are really linking to the CDN site.

Therefore, bear the following recommendations in mind:

Just because something is “trendy” doesn’t mean you should follow it like a sheep. Determine if it is really the best move for your business first.
A CDN is probably a smart idea if your website receives a lot of monthly traffic because it can help with bandwidth problems.
It’s likely that your present hosting arrangement can support the demand if your site currently only receives thousands of visitors each day.

There are workarounds for CDN-related image SEO problems, but make sure to plan your transfer carefully first.

See more» E-commerce Product Page Best Practices for 2023

Advanced Product Images Optimization Techniques: The best 4 tips you may not know yet

Now that you know the best practices to get perfect shots for your potential buyers, share with you a few tips for Product Image Optimization:

#1 Use Compression: Reduce Your File Size While Keeping High Quality

You must employ quick, light E-Commerce Product Images without sacrificing quality. Although online shoppers seek out high-quality photos, if your page loads slowly, they will go. The greatest method for striking the ideal balance between quality and performance for your E-commerce Product Photos is compression. The compression charge is frequently difficult to see with the naked eye.

#2 Choose The Right File Format: Convert Your Images to Next-gen

Image formats that are ready for the web include next-generation formats like WebP or AVIF. Compared to the conventional JPEG or PNG, they offer greater compression capacity without sacrificing image quality.

See more» Is it better to shoot RAW or JPEG?

#3 Apply Lazy-loading: Prioritize What Should Load First

The lazy-loading script means that you tell the browser to only load the E-Commerce Product Images above the fold. The priority will be given to the product images viewed by the online shopper. You can use the following script on E-Commerce Pictures to apply lazy loading:

<img src=”image.jpg” alt=”…” loading=”lazy”>
Or you can use a plugin like WP Rocket to help you — the caching plugin that will come in handy for the next point, too.

#4 Use Browser Caching: Keep Local Copies of Static Assets

One of the best ways to increase the efficiency of your online business is to use caching, especially if it has a lot of E-Commerce Product Images. WP Rocket may be used to implement caching as well.

Our E-Commerce Best Practices have shown us that one straightforward product image is no longer sufficient to persuade customers to make a purchase. You need 360-degree films, attractive E-Commerce Product Images, and more relevant visual information.

See more»

Source:

Start selling with Shopify today.shopify.https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips

(October 27, 2022).12 Best Practices for Your Product Images.imagify.https://imagify.io/blog/best-practices-product-images/

Nail your eCommerce product images with this strategy (+ 17 fail-proof tips).threekit.https://www.threekit.com/blog/ecommerce-product-image-strategy-tips