The Ultimate Blog Podcast - How to Optimize Images in WordPress

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

While blog image optimization might not be the most fun topic, it’s very important for improving site speed, SEO, and keeping your readers engaged and interested. If you want your blog to have the best possible images without slowing down your website, learning how to optimize your blog images is a step you can’t afford to skip.In this episode, we’re sharing what exactly blog optimization is and why you need it, where to find high-quality images, specific tools and tips on how to resize your images, and a new free resource that walks you through image optimization. Whether you’re new to blogging or you’re hundreds of blogs in, this episode is full of actionable tips you won’t want to miss!Check out the show notes for Episode 155!

Hey bloggers, are you serious about turning your blog into a money-making machine? One of the ultimate milestones is getting on an ad network. And let's be honest, figuring out how to get there can feel overwhelming. That's where the ultimate blog roadmap comes in. Our course and membership community are designed to help beginner bloggers like you build a rock-solid foundation for success. For just $97 a month, you'll get access to step-by-step training, all the resources you need,

and a supportive community to keep you accountable and motivated. You'll learn exactly how to create content that works, focus on the right steps to reach your goals faster, and also avoid wasting time on the things that don't really matter. Plus, our membership includes ongoing support and cheerleading and also guidance from other bloggers who have been where you are.

We have three monthly calls and a forum that's always open for collaboration and help. The best part, no more overwhelm. With the ultimate blog roadmap, you'll know exactly what to do and when to do it. It's a monthly membership designed to take the guesswork out of blogging and help you reach your goals for just $97 a month. If you're ready to join us, head over to ultimateblogroadmap.com and let's get started. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. This podcast is the podcast we wish we had when we started blogging. I'm Amy Reinike and I'm Jennifer Draper.

Our episodes dive deep into how to monetize your blog, sharing unique insights and practical tips. We bring you in-depth interviews with successful bloggers and experts who offer valuable, actionable advice. Our mission is to educate, support, inspire, and empower you in your blogging business. Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today we are talking about a really important concept when it comes to blogging, and that is image optimization.

And I know it's not maybe the most fun topic that we have ever had here on the podcast, but I'm going to tell you, it is a really important one. And we are being very intentional about sharing this with you today because making sure that you're optimizing your images on your website can make a big impact. So we are going to go over what our process is, what we recommend for you to optimize images on your blog. And Jennifer's going to kick us off by kind of talking to us about where we're sourcing images from on our blog. So take it away, Jennifer.

Yeah. So just a really quick overview here, and we're going to dive into lots of details. So grab your notebook if you can or come back and listen to this episode again later, because we are gonna give you like really good specifics here, but we're talking about making sure that you're, you're a getting good images for your website, and B that you're optimizing them properly. So they're not slowing down your website,

taking up all the space, all the storage space, and your hosting and all of that, because we've seen, we've experienced, we've learned the impacts of not making sure your images are correct and optimized. And so we're here to either help save you if you're just getting started, or we will also tell you what to do if you've already gone down this road and you're feeling like, uh-oh, what do I need to do now? But what I'm going to start talking about right now is getting images for your blog

in the first place. So most people know you need pictures for your blog. So this could be for pages, like your about page, you might want a picture of you, and then more specifically for your blog post. Because when you write a blog post, you want to be able to do a couple things. You want to be able to maintain the interest of the reader and you wanna be able to illustrate important things that you're teaching in your blog post.

So images are super important. We have people that want to learn visually, they might read, but they want to be able to see the corresponding picture of a step. So making sure that you are including relevant images in your blog post is really important. And those images can come from different places. Probably if we were to rank them,

the best thing to do would be for most people to take their own images, take their own photos. If they're making a recipe or creating a craft or they're traveling someplace, any of those types of things, you're going to want to take images so that you can provide context to the reader to support what you're teaching them, talking about, et cetera. Now that's not always going to be the easiest way to get photos. Sometimes taking pictures of a recipe

is very different than say, you know, teaching on a specific wellness topic or something. You may not have images to go with that. So you may have to go elsewhere to get images. And that could mean like hiring a photographer to take like images of you, if you're needing those for your posts and you have like a bank of images that you can use

of you and things like that, that support the kind of content you create. And then if all else fails and you still need some images, you can look into stock photography, which means you are using images that someone else has taken. And when we do that, what's important is making sure that we have the right to use those.

So there are some websites. One of them is Unsplash, you've probably heard of, Pexels, those will allow you to download certain images for free and use them. There's other paid options as well. So just, you can search some of those sites and see if you can find images that support the content that you're creating.

Just make sure it makes sense, that it adds value, et cetera. And what's important is that just make sure it makes sense, that it adds value, etc. And what's important is that you make sure that if you use an image that you did not create, that you have documented your right to use that image. Because using an image without explicit permission to do so could cost you money in the future. If that photographer finds out that you took their image and used it on your website, they can come after you later for damages or they can invoice you, et cetera.

So let's just make sure from the beginning that you have documented that you have the right to use that image. So if you are using something on one of these sites, just make sure you download or screenshot and save any language that says that you have the right to use that image and save that with the image on your computer

so that you have that documentation. So just making sure that you have the images that best support the content that you're creating and that you've sourced good quality images is important as your first step to, you know, adding images to your website. So you might be asking yourself if you've never thought about this before, like what is image optimization? So I want to just kind of go over that and essentially what image optimization is is just reducing the image file size without compromising the quality of the image.

You know, when you've resized an image before and then like it gets all like pixelated or, you know, it gets all wonky. We don't want that. So we want to resize it in a way that it maintains the integrity of the original image. So not compromising that quality. It also ensures that the images are the appropriate resolution and dimensions that you need for your blog and for your theme that you are using. So different parts of the theme are going to need different sizing potentially. And so you just want to make note of that in regards to the theme that you are using and make sure that your image sizes match accordingly so they fit appropriately in those spaces.

It is really important to consider image optimization from day one. Now if you're on day 900 of blogging and you have never addressed image optimizations, you're not like dead in the water here. We're okay. Take a deep breath. We're going to talk more about what you can do. But I do want to say to you, if you haven't started a blog yet, or if you're just on the front lines here, definitely do not ignore this step. And I totally recognize that this

is a step that can easily be ignored, but there are very important reasons why you don't want to ignore them. One of those being site speed. So when you upload these really large files onto your website, it essentially eats away at the storage component, which can also lead to a poor user experience because it takes a long time to load a really large image. How many of us have gone to a site and it takes forever to load the content or the images at all. You know, there's an image there, but you can't see it. Those images are not resized accordingly and they are not compressed in a way that the user is going

to see them right away. And so that does impact user experience. It also takes your site longer to load, which is not what we want. And in the day and age of instant gratification, users want to be able to see the content that they are searching for as quickly as we possibly can. So resizing your image, being on a good hosting company as well, will make an impact with that. Image optimization is also really important in regards to SEO because it helps search engines understand what your blog is about.

So in turn, it can improve your rankings. It can also help the visually impaired or somebody who uses a screen reader to understand like, what is this blog exactly about? So making sure that you're optimizing your images with alt text and things like that as well is going to be really important. It also offers a great mobile experience. So when you have smaller optimized images, those are going to be able to load faster when somebody is looking at your website from a mobile device. And if you go to your Google Analytics and you take

a look, I'm willing to bet over 50%, if not 70 to 90% of people are looking at your content on a mobile device. That is generally where people are looking from. So you want to make sure that your website is set up according to have a good user experience on a mobile device and compressing and resizing those images, optimizing your images is a really important piece of that. Also, it just helps the overall performance of your blog. So optimized images can contribute to reduced bounce rates and improve time on the page. So people are getting what they're there to see. They're not bouncing off. And so keep that in mind.

It is not just like an additional step that we are adding for fun. There really is importance here. And what we have found coaching several different students is we share this important piece. And what happens is they think it might not be like super important. So they might not, they might not do it from the start. And then they come to us later and say, Whoa, like I was putting huge images on my site and now I'm out of my hosting or I have to upgrade my hosting or my website is running really slow. And so please just do this from the start. If you're a new blogger, please don't skip

this step because once you optimize and once you know how to do this, it just becomes part of the routine. And we're going to talk about short pixel, but that's what we use to compress and it kind of runs in the background for you. So you're going to start just by resizing and then you're going to bring in short pixel to kind of do in the background for you. So you're gonna start just by resizing and then you're gonna bring in short pixels to kind of do the dirty work and stuff behind the scenes that you don't have to do all the time. Yeah, I think you said that perfectly. Like just get this started

and it's gonna start to feel very normal the more you've practiced this routine. And it is so, so, so important. If there's one thing you do to optimize your blog, this is going to be it. When people come to us with questions and they're looking at different site speed analyzers and things like this, typically the biggest red flag thing that stands out is they have too many large images on their site. And so what I'm going to do is walk you through kind of the two things you need to do to optimize

those images that you're loading onto your website. So when you're sourcing these images, whether they're coming out of your camera, from your phone if somebody took pictures for you and sent them over, or if you're downloading them from a stock photo website, those images are going to be all different sizes. And when I say size, that means both the dimensions of the image as well as the file size. So there's two pieces of that that you need to pay attention to. So we recommend that everybody have a process, even if you're not going to perform like edits in terms of like brightness and color and all that stuff on your photos, you do need to have like an editing process in place because you need to resize your images before you ever upload them to your website.

So you're going to need to use a tool. You might have something already on your computer that you could use to technically edit those images or the really common things that people use are going to be Lightroom or PicMonkey. Canva is another option or if you're super advanced, you may have Photoshop. But using a tool like that is going to be the first step to resizing your images before you upload them. So you're going to put your image in that tool and then you're going to do any other editing that you want to do. And then you're going to save those images. And there's a couple of things you're going to want to look for. So every theme is a little bit different in terms of the ideal image size, but pretty

standard across the board is going to be that the width of your image should be 1200 pixels. So whether your image is landscape or portrait, what you can generally do is just change the parameters in your software to say, I want the long edge to be 1200 pixels. And it will properly adjust the dimensions so that when it exports that image, that's the biggest that it will be.

Because if you have images that are way bigger in size, your website's having to work harder to make those images smaller so that it's serving them appropriately when it shows up, when people load your blog page. So there's no benefit to having them larger than they need to be, because your essentially website's

just gonna have to work harder. So sizing those correctly is going to, A, keep that from happening and B, also it's going to help reduce the file size. And so when you're looking at the file size, there's a couple of things that impact that. A, like I just said, the dimensions, but also the quality. And so a lot of these images are produced at a quality where you could print them. And that's very different than showing them on the web. So you can actually have them at a lower quality

and they will still look like they are supposed to. So one thing you can do is make sure that your settings are set to 72 pixels per inch, because larger than that is not gonna give you better quality on the web. So that will also reduce your file size. And then certain editing software like Lightroom will also let you set a parameter

so that it will automatically adjust some of that. And you can say, I don't want this to save any larger than 200 kilobytes. And so that's something you're gonna want to play with a little bit as you're saving, depending on the software you're using. You know, is it, do they let you set a different quality? Do they let you actually limit the size, et cetera?

But test that out and make sure that when you've downloaded that image back to your computer, that if at all possible, it is 200 kilobytes or smaller. And that will save you so much space just loading those images into WordPress. So once you've done that you've saved the images and now you're ready to actually upload them into WordPress. So there is another tool you're going to want to use called ShortPixel. Amy mentioned that. ShortPixel is a tool that

will automatically compress your images even more and keep you from losing quality. So this is a one-time thing. You can go in and get this plugin and set it up on your website and you will adjust all the settings depending on, you know, types of images, etc. that you have. And you will choose different compression levels. There's like glossy, lossy, lossless. I know it sounds like a lot, but if that's something that you need help with, you know, they have tutorials or that's something that we also work through in the Ultimate Blog roadmap to teach you how to do that as well. And so you will set this up once and essentially it's, I don't want to say set it and forget

it but you don't have to think about it a lot after you've set it up. At this point, every time you upload images into WordPress, it will automatically go through the process of optimizing and compressing those images. Yeah. And I think that's the important piece to hear what Jennifer's saying there is if you start this from the beginning, then it's part of the routine. And we're going to talk a little bit about what do you do if you've never optimized an image before. But if you just kind of have this routine as part of writing a blog post

or whether you're, you know, creating a page or whatever, when you have that as part of your routine, then you don't ever really know any different. And so it's not something that we would recommend like not doing, but just diving in, I know it can feel overwhelming. I feel like images and photography and all that can be very overwhelming for many bloggers, especially as they're getting started. But it's kind of one of those things that we really, we really do encourage you

to just figure it out with our help. We've created an eight step guide for you that we are going to put in our show notes so you can really get all of these notes and you don't have to figure this out and you don't have to listen to this episode 36,000 times, but you can just download this eight steps for image optimization. And that's going to be a really great resource for you to go back to, especially as you are integrating this new process into your routine. Yeah. Like Amy said, we have this checklist that will remind you of all the steps. And I think that the first couple of times you go through this, if you've never done it before,

it may feel a little challenging. But as you get the hang of it, it'll just become a second nature part of your process with everything else you do with writing a blog post. And yeah, again, it's so important. One more thing about ShortPixel is we get a lot of questions about how it works. So it's credit-based. And so you can use their free plan and it will optimize, I believe it's a hundred images per month. But what you have to consider is each image

that you're optimizing, when you set it all up, you may optimize it to different sizes that you're going to use in different spaces on your website. So one image will likely use multiple credits. And so there are also paid plans that you can buy packages or monthly plans. So you'll have to get some practice in terms of like how many blog posts am I going to write every month? How many images are going to be included in those? And you'll have to start to do a little calculation on how many credits you'll

need every month. But that's something that you'll be able to figure out. You know, you can start out if you just have a couple images to upload, you can get the hang of it and try it for free. And then you can start to figure out which package is going to work the best for you. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So if you're listening to this and you're like, oh boy, I have uploaded a lot of images

and nobody ever told me this. Well, I can relate to that because I did that too. And we've had people that are like, oh my gosh, do I need to replace every single image I've ever uploaded? Well, yeah, that would be fantastic, but like that's not even not ideal being reasonable. No, no, that's not something we'd recommend because that can just come with a whole other host of issues. So what you can do is just, okay, stop. Don't upload another image until you've optimized it. And then what you can also do is you can optimize to the

best of your ability the images that you've already uploaded using ShortPixel. So they have an option. You can buy a package. You can get it all set up and you can do a bulk optimization. So it may take just a little time. You might want to block off a few hours one day to do this, but you can go back and have it optimize all the images that you have on your site. It may not be quite to the extent that they would be optimized if you had sized them correctly, but it will still make a huge difference in how your site runs by installing and optimizing this plugin. I think the key thing there is knowing that perfection isn't necessarily the goal. If

you've been blogging for a while, like sure, ideally you could go back and take every image out and resize it to the best sizing and it'd be fantastic. But quite honestly, I don't know if that's going to be a good use of your time. So using short pixel, like Jennifer just said, is going to be the good option. You know, there's always a good, better, best. That's going to be the good option. So just something to consider. Don't beat yourself up about it. Like you don't know what you don't know, but now you do know. And so you want to make sure to optimize it accordingly. So I want to give you just some quick tips for ongoing image optimization. And this will all also be in that eight step guide that we have for you. Number one is always, always, always resize your images before uploading. That way you're not,

you're kind of avoiding any other additional compression steps that are unnecessary. So use one of those websites like Jennifer mentioned, either Canva or PicMonkey. Those are the most common. Some people do use Lightroom. If you're taking your own photos, you're likely using Lightroom or Photoshop. But if you're not taking your own images and doing a lot of edits, then Canva or PicMonkey are great options. But resizing that image before you get started is going to really work to your benefit. And then this is a really important step that you can kind of learn the hard way,

I feel like, and that is to optimize actually your image file names. So think about when you upload photos to your computer, it gives it like a IMG and then the number generally. Well, if you ever need to go back and find those images, that's going to be a royal pain in your you know what, because it is not easy to find. And so what you can do instead from the start is essentially label your images to match your blog post. So I

am going to use the example of walking benefits. So if I have a blog post that is about the benefits of walking, I would want to, let's say I have three images. I'm going to want to name each image like walking benefits one, walking benefits two, walking benefits three. And then when I need to go back, if I ever need to go back and find those images, then they are there for me. By also including those keywords in your file name, you can potentially rank on Google for that image. So that's another thing to consider.

Now we had Nina Claperton on the podcast to talk a lot about alt text and a lot of other things that you can do to make sure that your blog is in compliance with the ADA. But adding that alt text is really good for image accessibility and SEO. So you're going to want to go back and listen to episode 132 with Nina. It is a fantastic episode about compliance and why that is so important. But adding that alt text in and it's going to be descriptive text. So let's with this walking example, let's say that it's an image of me outside like at a park with like I'm at a park walking. And so I'm going to want to tell the person who is using a screen reader

exactly what that image is. So it would be like blonde girl in workout clothes at a park, walking with tennis shoes on something very descriptive there. And that is what alt text is meant for. So those are just some other quick tips that you can take into play here. When we talk about image optimization. I know it can be kind of an overwhelming topic. We don't want it to be overwhelming. We want it to just become naturally a part of your process as you're uploading image

to your website. But I know that there's a lot of things like this that you don't know unless you know and until somebody shares with you. And we do talk about a lot of these things within the ultimate blog roadmap and that course component in there. So if that is an area that you're like, huh, I wonder what else I've potentially missed, uh, visit our show notes and you can learn more about the ultimate blog roadmap and how we can help you and support you to make sure that your blog has just that really strong foundation going forward so you can be as successful as you can be. And also I want to make sure that you get that downloadable list and that guide. So when you are considering going through and optimizing your images or moving forward, optimizing your images that you really understand, you know, what we recommend. So you are gonna visit ultimate blog podcast

slash image optimization. And that is where you can get that free guide that is going to give you a great resource as you move forward and make sure that your images are optimized so you can be successful. Cause that's the goal. We want you to be as successful as you can be. And if you have any questions on this,

please feel free to reach out and ask us. ShortPixel is gonna become your new best friend and run in the background for you. We'll put a link to that in the show notes as well. So happy image optimization. You got this. I know it might be a new step for you, but you're going to thank us later

when your images are optimized and the size that they need to be, which makes your blog run as efficiently as it can. Thanks for listening to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about building your blog, visit theultimateblogpodcast.com backslash newsletter to get signed up for our email newsletter. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts. Thanks for tuning in today and we'll see you next time.