Watch the video here or read below.
So you’ve chosen all these photos and videos to put on your site. You are super excited and put them in all the areas you want. This is going to be great! After saving and then loading into your website to see your hard work you realize the site is slow! Photos and videos are not loading properly. How do you fix it? Do you use less photos, maybe no videos? What are you missing? Other websites have photos and videos and they work! It can be disheartening to think all that hard work was for nothing because now your site isn’t working properly. Don’t worry and don’t give up yet, you have missed something, it’s called photo and video optimization!
It is important that your photos and videos are optimized for the web. If they aren’t, it will cause serious slow downs on your website. Optimizing them means reducing the file size without sacrificing the quality. It is also important to choose the correct file type.
Photo Optimization
JPG is generally best for photos as you can reduce the file size dramatically without loosing a lot of quality. PNG can be used as well but the file size is a lot larger than JPG and you can’t reduce it as much as with a JPG without loosing the quality of the photo. But it is still a good option if you are looking for graphics with a transparent background. You should try to keep photos under 300kb if possible and if you need to use a large photo for an important place on the website make sure it’s no larger than 1mb. But really try and stay away from large size graphics for best results.
There are newer formats that have become available recently called AVIF and WebP, they are meant to replace JPEG and PNG. They are formats that have better compression and quality meaning they will be a smaller file size and load faster. Their compatibility with current web browsers is getting better. WebP is supported by more web browsers than AVIF at the moment but eventually they should be as supported as JPEG and PNG are now.
Another thing to consider when optimizing your photo is naming the photos in plain English. Search engines don’t only crawl the text throughout your site but the image information as well.
Video Optimization
Videos should try to be recorded in no more than 720p, as an mp4 and be as short in length as possible. You can also use video sharing sites such as YouTube or Vimeo to host your video for you and then you just embed the video on your website. This will help keep your page size smaller as the content is being stored on their server and then just being linked to from your site. This will allow you to share your video on your site and help keep your website from slowing down because of the video.
Different Ways Of Optimizing Your Media
There is a lot of software available for both Mac and PC to help you optimize your photos and videos. Do some research and find the right software for you. There is free and paid software out there depending on what you’re looking for.
If your site is built with Wordpress or something similar and you don’t or can’t do it yourself and don’t want to have someone do it for you, there are plugins that you can install that optimize your media for you. But be careful how many plugins you use on your site though because that in itself can cause other issues.
The other option is hiring someone to optimize your content for you before it goes on the site. Sometimes your web developer will offer those services and if not you can try reaching out to a business that handles that or even a friend who might have the software and know how.
No matter how you choose to do it, make sure that you get those photos and videos optimized before putting them on your site and you will be much happier with how it turns out!
We’d love to help you design or redesign your website to showcase all the amazing photos and videos you would like to share with visitors to your site!
You can request a Free Consultation or a Quote by:
Visiting our site:
Emailing us at:
Thank you and have a fantastic day!