Magento 2 Image Optimization: How to increase the website speed

Several components go into making a quality article for a website, such as the structure of the content, unique content, attractive title, ideal length etc. However, one of the crucial elements of a compelling article is the image. Product images, user-generated content from social media, sleek themes – online shoppers want to see what they purchase and engage with your website. But there is one concern with images: they slow down the speed of your website. The bigger the size and number of your images, the higher the loading time of the website. With Magento 2 Image Optimization, you can deliver both fast and attractive pages. Images constitute 70% of the webpage weight.

The significance of making images, lighter, and more streamlined cannot be underestimated. The difficulty in image loading is that it is a natural and most common hurdle for faster page loading. In this article, we discuss ways for Magento 2 Image Optimization and the top browser extensions to do so.

1. Resize and Compress

One of the most commonly utilised means to optimize images in Magento 2 is to resize and compress the image. Resizing images generally means reducing the resolution of the image i.e. the number of pixels. The picture quality declines drastically if the number of pixels is too low. Compressing images means stuffing more data into less space. It can be done in a lossy manner where you can reduce bits of pixels or shades, or in a lossless manner where you can just reduce the file size without altering picture quality.

The optimum thing you can do is amalgamate resizing and compressing. This way, you will minimize the number of pixels to the point where the quality is not good but still decent, and the use lossless compression. Magento support services offer built-in compression tools and compress images to 80% by default.

Bonus Read- Magento 2 Speed Optimization: Easy Ways To Speed Up Your Magento Store

2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

CDN are groups of servers across the globe that work together to provide quick delivery of online content. So when users wish to access an image, they don’t have to wait for a response from the server in a faraway location.

CDNs use a server that is at a close distance from the user. There are also smart CDNs that offer more optimization abilities. CDN is the easiest for effective optimization of images in Magento 2, as everything is automated and does not demand your active involvement.

3. Use of Vector images

Vector images do not comprise pixels. When you zoom these pictures, you don’t see blurred edges or outright squares. So if you have a small size image, you can maximize it as much as you want – it stays the same high quality. Therefore, using vector images instead of raster ones can enhance image quality without disrupting your website performance.

4. Enable Fastly Image Optimization

Fastly Image Optimization is an automated built-in tool for image optimization. It crops, resizes and adjusts ratio format without or with minimum human intervention. It supports the following formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, and animated GIF. As e-commerce is full of images, Adobe recommends using this tool to save from cumbersome manual optimization.

5. Substitute redundant images with fonts and icons

Images are useful in garnering attention from users and increasing conversion rates. Too many images can become too stuffy making the Magento 2 website slow. Users won’t bother about the images if the website takes longer to load. Thus, it is better to redundant images with fonts and icons.

With Image optimization for Magento 2, you will be able to compress and optimize JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF and TIF formats, opt between lossy and lossless compression, go for automated optimization and allow space for original image backup, and allocate only particular directories to the Magento 2 Image Optimization extension.

FAQs

Q. ) What image formats are best for Optimization?

Conventionally, websites use JPEG for photos and PNG for simple graphics and logos. However, WebP is the lightest format with the quality of previous formats. As not all browsers support the new format, we recommend uploading images in both PNG or JPEG and WebP versions.

Q.) What are the benefits of Image Optimization?

The primary benefits of Image Optimization are improved loading speed of the page, site experience for the users, boosts website SEO ranking, increase conversations and save server memory and minimize load on the server.

Q.) Does Image Optimization have an impact on SEO?

Firstly, you can enhance website performance with image optimization as Google takes into account the loading speed. Secondly, images with alt text allow Google to read your images. If the image and alt text is relevant to the content, you get those brownie points.

Q.) Does Image Optimization actually improve the performance of a Magento store?

Images account for 70% of the total page size. If you are able to minimize the size of the images, you can considerably deduce the page size as well, accelerating website performance.