Just wanted to share this, as I noticed by experience that this is the most common mistake most clients of mine do (and amateur web developers.. and less experienced web designers) …The mistake is that THEY USE LARGE IMAGES. (and this can kill their website’s potential)
And by the way if you’re using Thrive themes’ themes, viz. – Rise, Minus, Ignition etc.) your chance of making this mistake is prevented in majority (not all) of cases as the theme takes care of resizing.
But today, we use Thrive themes plugins with a lot of external themes. And no matter how much themes help you, it is not a fail safe.
And honestly it hurts me to realize how much leads, subscribers, customers, clients and sales people lose out because of this.
WHY? BECAUSE
Using large images = using more internet bandwidth
Using internet bandwidth = Slower load times
Slower load times = Increased bounce-rate/drop-offs
Increased drop-offs/bounce-rate = loss of subscribers, leads, sales, readers etc.
HOW CAN YOU AVOID THIS?
- The first things I do immediately after setting up WordPress these days is to install one of the top image compression plugins – ShortPixel or Smush. These plugins take care of massive uploads and also compressing the image. Be careful as they might slightly reduce your image quality in some cases. But you can turn it off in plugin settings.
- Second, before uploading images, crop, resize them to the right size manually. Anything above 2048 pixels in width/height should be avoided as much as possible unless in special cases – for e.g. if you have a product zoom feature on your site.
- If you use (disclaimer: affiliate link ahead) Siteground to host your website like I do, install SG Optimizer plugin on your WordPress site and enable the image optimization options.
Question to readers, what are you first steps / default plugin installations when you create your WordPress sites?
