10 fantastic questions (& our top tips): optimise every website image now
Simon and Rach mucking around with paint brushes to illustrate the point that every business can get to grips with optimising their website images!
How to optimise web images on your website for better seo
As a website design studio in South Devon, designing stunning websites for creatively-inclined businesses across Devon and the UK, we answered burning questions about optimising web images for your website at a session with our Website Club members. This is the follow up looking at frequently asked questions all to do with good website images.
Thankfully it’s easy to get hold of high quality images these days, whether you use Unsplash, Pexels or perhaps from your phone (although nothing can beat brand photography!).
However, uploading massive images (both in filesize and dimensions) to your website and walking away without no other intervention is a bad idea.
These hefty images will quickly slow down your site (bad for SEO) as well as miss the opportunity to give helpful signposts to Google, those browsing search results plus people with visual impairments using screen readers.
Does my web image alt text need hyphens between each word?
No, unlike the filename for a web image, your image’s alt text doesn't need hyphens between each word.
That means you can write it in beautiful, long form prose!
Bear in mind that you have a maximum of 125 characters, so keep it focussed and think about the purpose of the overall page.
The overall is to provide a helpful description of the image as if someone were unable to see it. This is the idea behind alt text: if someone is using an accessibility reader; an image is broken; or a browser is unable to display it the alt text is the fallback.
Does Squarespace resize website images when I upload them?
When you upload an image to a Squarespace website it automatically creates seven variations of each uploaded image. This is to ensure the image is displayed well on any screen size.
However, you still need to ensure you upload images according to certain parameters for best results.
The key things to remember with your web images are:
File size no bigger than 500KB
A maximum of 1,500 pixels wide for a general image
Maximum 2,500 pixels wide for a full-width image (such as in a banner)
Can I add alt text to an image embedded via an Instagram feed on my website?
You can add alt text to Instagram images, but you will need to do it natively within Instagram. Read more on how to edit the alternative text for a photo on Instagram.
Any alt text added to an Instagram image will be accessible within the feed that appears via your Squarespace embed block. You can check this (if you’re curious or technically minded) using your browser’s 'Inspect Element'.
This means the image and its alt text can be indexed by Google as well as read by accessibility screen readers. As such, it is a good idea to add and optimise any alt text on Instagram.
Best practice would be to add any alt tags in Instagram first.
Should I delete and replace all images in my website image bank and start again?
Probably not - before doing anything, do a little audit and make a simple plan to keep yourself ordered and on track. Once you start deleting images, you can easily lose track, plus images might go missing on other pages on your website that you've forgotten about.
We'd recommend doing one page at a time and double-checking where an image appears on your site, especially if it is on multiple pages. Also, bear in mind that the images which appear live on pages that are the important ones - focus on those first.
Should I delete all the old larger images on my Squarespace website?
If you've got the time and capacity, then yes, it's a good housekeeping exercise to remove any defunct or unused images, particularly large ones.
However, if you're under time or capacity pressure, though, always focus on the images that will appear live on a page first.
How do I check my images are the correct size and have alt text in Wordpress?
You can add alt text from the Wordpress Media Library or the Block Editor in Wordpress. If you have the Yoast SEO plugin, it will also tell you any images on your site that are missing alt text.
Wordpress also allows you to edit the default size for images that you upload via Media Settings in your Admin Dashboard. To check details of a specific image, select it within a post or page and then use the Image Dimensions section in your settings panel to make changes.
What is a slug?
A slug is the part of an URL after the last backslash, such as 'website-club' in wildings.studio/website-club.
An example of an image’s slug on our website might be /website-club-wildings-studio-devon - from the image at the top of our Website Club page.
Note that we’ve kept it to five words and been careful to include the keywords that relate to the overall purpose of that page.
A URL plays an important part in overall website SEO: read more on URL slugs and why they matter for SEO.
Should I optimise images in my blogs?
In terms of optimising images on blog posts, yes, absolutely! Don’t make the mistake of focussing solely on images on the ‘main’ pages on your website.
Blog content is a key and critical part of helping you get found on search results. Google favours websites that are updated regularly with fresh, quality content.
Make sure you optimise your images on blog posts as well as the main pages on your website.
Should I delete old, unused images on my website?
In order to fully clear images off Google, you need to delete them from your site. However, this is not critical, so we would recommend focussing on other tasks first before spending time on removing images.
The first priority is to optimise images that appear on screen. If you do delete images from your site, over time they will cease to appear in Google searches, although it can take quite a long time.
How can I improve the SEO of my portfolio pages which have photos but few words?
This is a great question from a photographer who tends to publish work regularly in her portfolio with lots of images rather than write blogs in text form.
In this instance, image alt text is not enough to boost your SEO performance. Words are very important for SEO and optimising images is a fairly minor part of SEO.
If you have a portfolio website like a photographer, we'd recommend incorporating some text in a piece that says a few words about what you did and for whom. Think about some of the things people may search for and try and capture those keywords in a few paragraphs.
Alt text on its own is not enough to get best results. You can also use your blog to write more in-depth articles to back up your portfolio items, ensuring to link them with internal links on your website.
So those are ten questions successfully answered from small businesses and business owners grappling with how to optimise web images for their websites. If you’d like to learn more from us on website design or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram. You can read more of our blogs on website design too.
