Preparing product images for WooCommerce can be a tedious task. You can easily snap a picture of your products and just add it to your site. Unfortunately, snap and upload is not the way to go.
A digital image from a camera is usually very large. It can easily reach upwards of 2MB in size. When you put a 2MB image on your product page, your customers would have to wait at least a couple of seconds before they can see the image.
If you have more than one image, it’s going to take even longer. Eventually, someone would just get tired of waiting and head over to a competitor’s website. Not convinced? Check out this post on how loading time affects your bottom line.
How to Prepare Your Images for Web
Preparing product images to upload into your WooCommerce store requires an image editing tool, such as Adobe Photoshop. Check out this post from our blog to learn how to use Photoshop to prepare your images for uploading on your website.
If you don’t have Photoshop, there are some alternatives in the form of web tools. You can check out this post on Mashable, which lists down a couple of tools that can help you optimize your images.
Understanding Image File Types
When working with images, understanding image file types is necessary. Certain types of images are best suited to a certain file type. You need to know what that file type is, so your images will look good even if they are scaled down.
Here’s a good article that details the most common image file types including when you should use each file type.
An important note: Using an image editing tool like Photoshop is still the better option since it gives you better control on how you want to optimize your images.
Using Descriptive Files Names
One more thing you need to do before uploading your image to your WooCommerce store is to name them properly. Ideally, you’d want to use a file name that describes your image like “red sling bag”. This would make managing your media library easier. Searching for specific images on your media library would be very difficult if you use default image file names such as IMG0001.jpg.
When you’ve finally uploaded your image file, you should also add an alt tag that will tell search engines what your image is. Using alt tags is best practice for SEO but that doesn’t mean you cram keywords on your alt tags. Your alt tags should describe what your image is.
Now that you have a better idea on how to prepare your images for your e-commerce store, you can improve its page load speed. Eventually, you’ll start to see its effect on your conversion rates.
If you don’t have time to spend on editing product images, the Wooassist team is here to help you out. With our experience, you’ll have your images optimized and look professional in no time.
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