Optimising Your Squarespace Website Images for Better SEO Results in the UK
As the adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is especially true on the web. Images can evoke emotions and convey messages that words alone cannot, making them an integral part of any website. However, simply adding images to your website won't guarantee success. To stand out, your images need to be optimised for both aesthetics and performance.
In this article, we'll cover some essential steps for optimising your website images to improve load times and provide a better user experience. From colour requirements to image formatting, we'll explore how small tweaks can make a big difference.
Colour Requirements for Online Images
To ensure your images look crisp and natural on web browsers, they need to be in RGB (red, green, and blue) colour mode with standard RGB (sRGB) colour profile. This is different from print photos, which are typically rendered with CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) colour profiles, representing the inks used to print colour graphics or images.
Optimising Image Size
The size of your images can have a significant impact on load times and user experience. Images viewed on desktop computers or laptops are typically larger than those viewed on tablets or mobile phones. As such, it's important to optimise your images for different screen sizes. Photos that are narrower in width won't look as good on a desktop browser, while photos with a lot of detail might look blurry or indistinct on a mobile phone.
To optimise your images, consider resizing them to match the expected dimensions on your site. There are several tools available to help you achieve this, including Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, and Canva.
Optimising Images for Website Load Time
The number and size of images on a page can significantly impact your website's load time, even on Squarespace websites where you have high-performance website hosting. Larger images take longer to load than smaller images, and having multiple large images on a page can slow down how quickly your site appears. This can negatively impact your traffic and cause visitors to leave your site before viewing your content. Squarespace recommends keeping individual images below 500kb in file size and overall page sizes under 5MB.
To optimise your images for faster load times, consider compressing them. There are several tools available for this purpose, such as TinyPNG and Optimizilla. Additionally, consider using lazy loading (via a lazy loading Squarespace plug-in if you have specific requirements), which loads images as the user scrolls down the page rather than all at once.
Image Formatting Requirements
Different web hosting services have different file format requirements for images. For example, Squarespace accepts common image file extensions such as .jpg, .gif, or .png. The name of an image file also needs to follow certain specifications, such as containing only letters, numbers, underscores, and hyphens. If uploaded images have a name with special characters or punctuation, they might not load properly.
In Conclusion
Optimising your website images is essential for improving user experience, website performance and overall SEO for your Squarespace website. By following these best practices, you can ensure your images look great, load quickly, and don't negatively impact your site's traffic. Remember to regularly review and optimise your images as your site evolves, and you'll be well on your way to creating a visually stunning and high-performing Squarespace website.
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