The Ultimate Guide to Website Images 2021

Join our active community of Squarespace users and professionals for advice, inspiration, and best practices. For example, if it’s a picture of an umbrella on a beach, write the alt tag to include something about a beach umbrella. Be very descriptive as if you were describing it to someone who couldn’t look at it. Between the single quotation marks, you’ll put the image URL or file path.

• This is a handy feature – especially if you already have a website filled with images.
• The majority of us use Google Chrome as our default browser.
• You can use multiple divs on a page for multiple elements.
• In the first part of the post we will list the recommended image sizes for your Flothemes site.
• Note the image sizes that work best on your Shopify store for future use.
• To submit a notice of claimed copyright infringement, you will need to submit a notice of infringement using the form below.

To learn the difference between these three types of CSS, see our guide on how to add CSS to HTML. The HTML image element is an “empty element,” meaning it does not have a closing tag. Unlike elements like paragraph that consist of an opening and a closing tag with content in between, an image specifies its content with attributes in the opening tag. Examples might be simplified to improve reading and learning.

Why are image sizes and site performance important?

Choosing wide-angled images will make background images fulfill their intended purpose. However, keeping the file size of images as small as possible without compromising the quality is vital for quick loading time. An online image compression software like the one by TinyIMG can keep the quality and reduce the file size of background images. Large images slow down your web pages which creates a less than optimal user experience. Optimizing images is the process of decreasing their file size, using either a plugin or script, which in turn speeds up the load time of the page.

In this case, you would apply CSS to the body element. Using a CSS selector, you can define the background-image property in the head section of your HTML file or in an external stylesheet. For this demo, we’ll use the same image as above and change the text color to white so we can see it. This will produce the same result as the image above, where the style attribute was used. It’s important to note that you can also specify the size of an image using internal or external CSS, over inline CSS.

Premium Images too? Why?

Save your page and open it in your browser of choice. You may need to tweak your width and height settings and the opacity of the image until you’re happy with the final product. Secret Escapes features a CTA front-and-center in their hero image, as well as their value proposition. The image that they use also demonstrates examples of the travel destinations that they offer. In some cases, you might want to lazy load images for faster first-page render.

The best method is to quickly resize the image in a photo editing tool beforehand, and then upload it and use one of the following plugins to reduce it further. The WordPress media library creates thumbnails https://wizardsdev.com/ based on your settings. However, the original is still retained and untouched. If you want to resize your images and save disk space by not saving the original, you can use a free plugin like Imsanity.

You can try Optimole for free or upgrade to the premium plan if you need extra bandwidth and processing space. Getting rid of the original image and resizing your larger images can also be done with this plugin. So with more and more HiDPI displays nowadays, it can be good to find a happy medium.

Finding Unoptimized Images

Now that you know what dimensions you need for all the elements on your site, we’ll explain how to optimize all your images for size, that’s in terms of data sizing. The file size of your images is also very important for the web. Uploading bloated and heavy images on your website will strain your server resources, slow down your site, and in effect create a negative user experience. With Chrome and Safari you can also use the developers inspector tool to find image sizes on the site. The principle will be the same as before, inspect the various elements on the site, and note down the sizes. Double the image sizes for retina devices and then upload them to WordPress, once they have been optimized for web and titled correctly for SEO.

Note that devices have different ratio than the one you shoot and it is possible your images will be cropped when viewed on web. As a recommendation try to shoot wider shots than usual for your web content, to avoid cropping of important image content. High-resolution images have large file sizes and are not compressed or optimized for web viewing.

Checking if the site connection is secure

Sometimes an old version of the browser causes the problem of images not showing. Keeping your browser up to date protects it from bugs and malware. So update your browser if it is not and check whether the problem is solved or not.

I’m sure I’ve seen this somewhere here at WP Beginner but I cannot find it. To check the causes of your slow site you can use GTmetrix and then open the waterfall page where it will show the times of the individual pages items loading. Once you know what is the problem you can then address it. We would recommend checking with the support for the plugin that you are using as they normally have an option to remove the unoptimized version. Additionally, when it comes to resizing images, you should always resize them before you upload them to your website.

Saved em time and effort and had just the advice I was looking for. They also have an extension for Adobe Photoshop which is what we use as part of our image editing process because it lets you access TinyPNG from inside Photoshop. First, you need to open your image in GIMP and then select the File » Export As… option.

Embedded videos are a good way to avoid file size and storage limits from your host provider. Don’t let the video compete with the content on the page. Make sure there’s enough contrast between the text and image color that you can easily read the text.

You should host your own images, which in simple setups means keeping the images for your website on the same server as your HTML. In more advanced setups, you might use a CDN to deliver your images. Use the HTML image attributes to set the size of the image to 250 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall. The required alt attribute provides an alternate text for an image, if the user for some reason cannot view it . This makes it easier to compress images using Smush.it without having to prep them beforehand. You can add flickr photos in WordPress by simply pasting the photo URL in a post.

Banner images should be designed according to the dimensions required and compressed to a small image file size. Keeping the focus area of the image to the middle will avoid any cropping of the pictures when they are displayed on mobile devices. There are several plugins that will automatically optimize your image files as you upload them. They’ll even optimize images that you’ve already uploaded.

If you’re not saving images optimized for the web, then you need to start doing so now. It will make a huge difference in your site speed, and your users will thank you for it. Finally, Should you prefer WebP image format to PNG you should click on the ‘Export’ button to save the optimized image file. Typically, these photos have a resolution of 300 DPI and dimensions starting from 2000 pixels and more.

A hero image can also direct users towards a desired link or call-to-action, or present your business’ value proposition at the top of the webpage. Hero images on media sites and blogs can also be used to catch the visitors’ attention, and draw them into reading the article on the page. But sometimes we face problem to resize images for better results and increase the speed of the website.