I was talking to someone just the other day and saying that it was important that images on a website mustn’t be larger than needs be. Quite rightly the person I was talking to, said; Why’s that Simon? We were talking really about blog post images. You know, the main image type that me and many others tend to have at the top of a blog post. This answer though is relevant to all images on your website, so here’s the answer or answers as there are a few reasons.

For m, a good reason is that if the image is too large, the image will take longer to load. Maybe your site visitor will lose patience and then just simply leave your site. That is definitely not a good outcome! Another vitally important reason is that Google uses site speed as a “signal” in it’s algorithm. It’s just one of the many things that Google uses to determine where in the index a particular web page will be. Large images slow a page down and therefore because of this, you could lose position in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

While I’m here and talking about images, I just want to mention ALT tags. This is the short piece of information that shows up if you hover over an image.Write good descriptive ALT tags that describe the image. Don’t stuff them with keywords. Google looks for the ALT tag. It knows that there is an image but obviously it can’t see it. The ALT tag tells Google what the image is about and you get Brownie points for using a good ALT tag. Another one of those SEO signals that Google looks for.

I can’t really go into detail here about how to resize images, so please research this and find a good image editor to help you make sure that your website images are of the optimum size.

If you’d like some free help and advice about image resizing or anything else website or web marketing related, you can contact me by phoning 01603 383477 or filling in my contact form.