If you’ve read our previous blog posts (and why wouldn’t you??) you’ve learned what photos work best for the different parts of your website, and where to find great photos for your real-estate website. Our third and final post on the subject of website photography is similar to our first, in that it deals with the technical aspects of your photos; namely, photo size and optimizing photos. And in keeping with our less-is-more philosophy, we’re going to make this pretty simple and straightforward.
After all, you’ve gotta help your clients buy and sell homes, not take an online course on website photography.
Optimizing Photos for Faster Page Loads
First, it’s crucial to understand the relationship between page-load times and bounce rates. In a nutshell, the longer it takes for a webpage to load, the likelihood that site visitors will leave (“bounce”) before doing anything else on that page is much higher. You don’t really need to take away much more than that. Slow page loads = fewer potential customers.
Your next question should be: “How can I speed up my page load times?”
Luckily for you, TRIBUS does most of that for you! Even at the earliest stages of the design process for a new website, we’re always thinking about load times. If we think a design element or client-requested feature will negatively impact load times, we’re going to advise against it, and we’ll most likely recommend an alternative or two that won’t put such a strain on load times. Getting those extra seconds (or even milliseconds) back matters.
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But once your site launches, and we’re no longer guiding you step-by-step through the set-up process, it’s important to remain aware of how page loads can impact your site’s bounce rate, and know what you can do to help keep that metric in check.
How to Start Optimizing Photos
Now, we’re finally at the point where we can tell you not to upload huge photos to your site!
We actually hear something like this a lot: “…But my photos are only three megabytes.” When you’ve got even base-model cell phones shooting 12-megabyte photos, it’s understandable that there’s such a popular misconception about photo size. Believe it or not, a three-megabyte photo is ridiculously large for a website. You may not realize it, but you can significantly reduce the size of your photos while still maintaining image quality.
There are tons of available tools you can use to edit your photos. Photoshop is one of the best, but it’s also very robust, and contains hundreds of features you’ll probably never use, unless you’re a graphic designer. It’s also not free, and we like free. One free solution we like for optimizing photos is Pixlr. With Pixlr, you can quickly perform the most common photo edits and then some. It won’t take up space on your hard drive because it’s totally cloud-based. And, again, it’s FREE! What photo editing programs do you use? Feel free to share in the comments below!
Now that you’ve resized your photos from billboard size to web-friendly size, there’s one final step to making them lightning-fast in the page-load department: compress them! Compressing a photo strips it down to the bare essentials in terms of colors and metadata, while maintaining quality that’s just right for websites.
Our go-to site for photo compression is TinyPNG. You can drag and drop your resized photos right into your browser and let TinyPNG do the rest. Files that have been “tinified” can then be downloaded individually, or in a zip file for multiple photos. Oh, and TinyPNG has a free version!
In the website game, time is of the essence. People are impatient and don’t want to wait even a second longer for a page to load. They’ll close their browser window in a hurry, or search for another site that loads faster than yours. Anything you can do to speed up your site’s page loads, we heartily recommend. By resizing, compressing and optimizing photos, you’ll keep yourself ahead of the pack!
