Image Size for SEO
-
Hi there I have a website which has some png images on pages, around 300kb - is this too much?
How many kbs a page, to what extent do you know does Google care about page load speed? is every kb important, is there a limit?
Any advice much appreciated.
-
Yahoo's Smushit.it is a tool that can do some lossless compression on your images and may be of use. If you use Wordpress, there's also a smushit plugin that will compress your images on upload.
Page load speed does have an impact both for users and search engines. It's certainly something to consider.
-
Load time is absolutely a consideration in rankings, go into you google webmaster tools account and you can see your site performance and how your load time compares to other sites on the web. Images are just one aspect of why your page load times could be considered slow but it is a factor. Get the yslow extension for firefox and that will give you some suggestions about what other changes you can make on the site to reduce load times.
I would play around with optimizing your images in photoshop and see what percentage decrease you can get away with without noticing a difference. If all of your images are roughly the same quality you can do a batch in photoshop, which is basically making an action first, for example saying shrink all images by 15% and then batch all of the images in the image folder and photoshop will shrink them all in one shot.
-
Agree with Wayne, but for reference I'll have a large, good quality image at around 70kb and a standard image at around 20 - 30kb. If I can get it in for less without it looking terrible I will.
If you have photoshop it shouldn't be much of a problem playing with the save for web setting and seeing how much you can trim off. 60% is a good standard for jpg files.
-
Hi Paul,
I'm not 100% on the actual "size" of the image having any negative effects. In my experience it's directly related to how well the image is optimized. Yes, load time ABSOLUTLEY has an effect on rankings, and while some will say that it's a small effect, I contend that it's an important consideration.
While Google may not give it primary consideration in their algorithm, it can drive your users away as they wait for a page to load. People are going to wait a mere second or two before they back out of a page that is not loading. So bounce rate is the factor you need to weigh with regard to image size.
Other tips to optimize your image properly include, always add height and width to the image for faster loading, always add an Alt-attribute to the IMG-tag, always add a Title-attribute to the IMG-tag, etc.
Best of luck,
W
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Updating product pages with new images - should I redirect old images ?
Hello,
Technical SEO | | ninjahippo
We have approx 900 products on our website. Over the coming months we will be replacing the product images. At the moment they have file names like 'green_widget_54eb3a78620be.jpg'
the random jumble at the end of the filename was apparently to keep file names unique. We have removed the jumble part and will have file names like:
'black_widget_with_stripe_001.jpg' The CMS removes the old main image when a new main image is uploaded. But we could change this to leave the old image, but not use it. My question is should we: redirect the old file name to the new file name? upload the new image, and leave the old image in place Or do we just ignore.0 -
SSl and SEO
Does the type of SSL used on a site have any significance to trust and seo ranking?
Technical SEO | | unikey0 -
Geographic location of hosting affect SEO
Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you
Technical SEO | | summer3000 -
Update page for better SEO score?
Hi, Is it important to update a page sometimes to score better in SEO?
Technical SEO | | parfumerienl
Or if i make a page and never change it, it would be good enough.0 -
Types of SEO Help
I have a web site that is going well but I think it could be better as far as usability and design. Also, I am sure an SEO professional would have some things to do to optimize. It seems though, that all the SEO companies either want to have along term contract or they don't work with my technology. Does anyone know of a company that would take my Visual Studio/C# project and tweak it for usability, design and SEO features for an hourly or set price?
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
Https enabled site with seo issues
Hello, Is there a problem with seo bots etc to crawl and rank my wesbite well if the entire site is https enabled? We have a sign in button which results on the next page being https along with the main homepage and all other pages are https enabled. Any major setbacks to the seo strategies? How do I overcome these issues?
Technical SEO | | shanky10 -
Querystring params, rel canonical and SEO
I know ideally you should have as clean as possible url structures for optimal SEO. Our current site contains clean urls with very minimal use of query string params. There is a strong push, for business purposes to include click tracking on our site which will append a query string param to a large percentage of our internal links. Currently: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/ Will change to: http://www.oursite.com/section/content/?tg=zzzzwww We currently use rel canonical on all pages to properly define the true url in order to remove any possible duplicate content issues. Given we are already using rel canonical, if we implement the query string click tracking, will this negatively impact our SEO? If so, by how much? Could we run into duplicate content issues? We get crawled by Google a lot (very big site) and very large percent of our traffic is from Google, but there is a strong business need for this information so trying to weigh pros/cons.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
How does a mega drop-down affects SEO?
We are looking at implementing a "mega drop-down" as our main menu on our website. Will that be good or bad for SEO? My company is a big tour operator so our website contains a lot of pages describing all our destinations, hotels etc. We have noticed that our visitors have some trouble to navigate to all this pages since it requires a lot of clicks to reach a specific page. In order to make this easier we have looked at this popular mega drop-down thing that we all love. But what about Google? Will Google love or hate us for doing this? An example showing what I mean by mega drop-down: http://www.phonehouse.se/
Technical SEO | | Googleankan0