"A picture can paint a thousand words". An adage that is true for all things online. Whether it's an image of a product or a place, having them on the website is an excellent way to communicate with your audience.
Also, with many sites having similar products, ideas, and services, an image can leave a lasting impression, enhance user experience, and drive traffic to the webpage.
To stay ahead of the competition, companies need to understand not just the value of visuals, but also how and why they should be optimized. Optimized images can prove to be a great differentiator between successful and unsuccessful businesses.
If you're already aware of the importance of image optimization, you can skip the next section and jump straight to how ImageKit can help you achieve it for free.
If you're still not convinced, let us look at how image optimization can help you stay ahead of the curve.
Simply put, image optimization is a process of quickly delivering images in the correct format, dimensions, and compression level to each device while ensuring good visual quality.
For example, you cannot use a product photograph clicked using a DSLR camera directly on your website. That image would run into quite a few megabytes and take forever to download for your user. You need to resize the image down to the exact dimensions required on your website, convert it to, let’s say, JPG format, and compress it a bit to get the size down to a few Kilobytes, making it more in line with what is acceptable on a website. And then you need to ensure that this image is delivered quickly to your user’s device regardless of their geographical location.
- Faster page load for better conversions - With optimized images, your page size goes down, and the images load faster, in turn reducing the total load time of your page. This reduction in load time results in an improved user experience helping improve retention, and decreasing the bounce rate. Thus, the chances of a user converting, either purchasing a product or signing up on your website, improve significantly with image optimization.
- Better SEO for organic traffic - Search engines like Google also factor in the page load speed when ranking any webpage. Lower the page load time higher is the organic traffic you can get to your website.
- Perfect image experience across devices - Most of the users use their smartphones and other hand-held devices to access websites. Therefore, for a perfect visual experience, you need to ensure that the images are resized correctly irrespective of the user's device.
The stepping stone of any successful online business is using correctly optimized and resized images.
So why are these seemingly clear and straightforward tasks, in practice, difficult to achieve? Is it the lack of a simple, yet complete tool for image optimization? Or something that is easy to set up for any website and doesn’t cost a bomb?
Well, all of that now changes with ImageKit.
What is ImageKit and how can it help with image optimization?
ImageKit is a one-stop solution for all your image-related needs. It has all the features you need in a good image optimization product.
- Real-time URL-based image transformations like resizing and cropping
- Automatic best format selection including WebP support
- Automatic image compression
- Intelligent cropping with Smart Crop
- Image overlays (watermarks)
- A ready-to-use media storage and many other features.
All the optimizations and transformations are done in real-time and can be changed directly from the URL.
Combine this with AWS CloudFront Content Delivery Network, that comes by default with ImageKit and has 150+ delivery nodes across the globe, your images will not only be smaller in size, but will load in a few milliseconds for all your users.
And it is now available for free!
At ImageKit, we understand that you don’t work with bottomless budgets, and have to be sure about the investments you make. And something as basic as image optimization should be accessible to everyone regardless of the size of their online presence.
That is why we have launched our Forever Free plan, giving you access to all the image-related features mentioned above, and up to 20GB bandwidth for delivering optimized images every month, which translates to close to a million files that you can load with ImageKit! And yes, it is free, no credit card needed. Ever.
Whether it is a WordPress blog, or a Magento or Shopify e-commerce store, or any other website for that matter, ImageKit can work for you with just a few minutes of setup and a small URL change. And if you are migrating from a complex third-party image management system, our team can help you with that as well.
ImageKit’s Forever Free plan grants you access to a single world-class tool to address multiple image-related requirements and turn your users into custodians of your brand.