They say that a picture is worth a thousand words—but in the online world, if that picture is a poor-quality or badly-optimised image, it may be worth considerably less. Your intended audience won’t wait around for a massive, uncompressed image to load on your website and blurry or pixelated content can actually be detrimental to the overall perception customers have of your business.

Worse still, if you have an image or a collection of images on a webpage that are taking a long time to download, Google and other search engines will penalise you for having a slow-loading website and drop your listing down in search rankings.

Managing file sizes, proper naming conventions and appropriate tagging are all crucial elements when adding images to your website and your content. Doing this incorrectly will leave you with a sloppy-looking and low-quality result, that will hamper your efforts to promote content and ultimately waste your time.

Having said that, you could always play it safe and not use images (or very few) on your website. However, be warned: big blocks of text and endless paragraphs of copy aren’t very digestible for the digital customers of today and will probably repel your audience.

Using images online works so well because images entice users to click links to content; they can help give a clearer understanding of a point or topic (think flowcharts or step-by-step guides); and they break up long, potentially boring sections of text into manageable chunks for users to easily get through.

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn now all incorporate and encourage the use of images when posting from your accounts. Posting a link from your website on one of these sites will more than likely load a thumbnail image from the most prominent picture on that particular page—so it’s worth investing a bit of time planning and organising quality images that appeal to your audience and garner more clicks for you.

Talk to us today to find out how we can help you get the most out of your images online.