The importance of optimizing, how and where to do it
The importance of images in connecting users to your products has been proven. If your website takes too long to load, users are more likely to abandon it which will drastically increase your bounce rate and eventually, it will affect your conversions.
Do I lose quality by optimizing?
Absolutely not, let's compare two images - The top one is not optimized and it's size is 3.2 MB. Below is the same image after being optimized and the size is way less than the original - 750 KB (0,7 MB). Can you spot any difference in quality?
Image optimization is about reducing the file size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality so that your page load times remain low. It’s also about image SEO. That is, getting your product images and decorative images to rank on Google and other image search engines.
Recommended sites for image optimization
https://tinypng.com/
TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!
https://imagecompressor.com/
This online image optimizer uses a smart combination of the best optimization and lossy compression algorithms to shrink JPEG and PNG images to the minimum possible size while keeping the required level of quality.
You can upload up to 20 images. Wait for the compression to finish. Click thumbnails in the queue for quality setting. Use the slider to control the compression level and mouse/gestures to compare images.
In case you need free stock photos, check out our Stock Image Gallery. We have a great variety of royalty-free images to offer, or read this Google search to explore more options when it comes to image sourcing.