No. In fact, you should not have large images on your website. Large images make your website load slowly and page speed is a very important ranking factor for Google. People are impatient and they want the results of their search to appear quickly, and if your page is slow to load that won’t happen.
Quality Images not Large File Sizes
You want quality images and you can have full width images but not large file sizes.
To resize your images the best tool are Photoshop or Photoshop Element, however most people don’t have access to these. Start with what you have, do you have Paint? If not canva.com or picresize.com are is a great free tools and there are plenty of others free tools you could use.
Warning on Reducing Image Sizes
When reducing images you need to be aware of a few things:
- Keep your proportions
- Reduce in degrees
Keep Your Images in Proportion
Be careful to lock your proportions so you reduce the width to the same percentage as the depth. You may need to crop the image if it doesn’t fit into the area you have allocated.
Reduce Your Image in Degrees
When resizing or reduce large image sizes don’t just grab the corner and make it really small. Reduce your images in bit size pieces to maintain the quality and integrity of the image. Don’t reduce your image by more than ¼ at a time. Never try to make an image bigger if you have reduced it too far, undo or start with the original image.
What Images Should I Use on My Website?
The best images to use on your website are crisp clear images that you own, either you have taken them yourself or you have permission to use them. You can’t use an image just because it is on a website or social media; the copyright belongs to someone else. Copyright infringement can be costly. On several occasions, I have had stock photo companies contact me in relation to “proof of use” for their photos all with significant fees attached, of course on all occasions I have been able to provide proof of purchase but if I hadn’t it would have been very costly.
For stock photos proof of purchase is required by the end user so if your designer or advertising agency has purchased them on your behalf make sure you document that so if it comes to be an issue you are covered.
Image Size
Image size has 2 components
- The dimensions ( size of width and height (or depth)
- The size of the file.
You can have a large dimension for a full width image for example 2050 px (pixels) wide, however you don’t want this image to be any more than 150kb (kilobytes) in file size.
If you have multiple images on a page you must make sure that your image sizes stay small.
Recently I was asked to fix a website because it wasn’t loading properly – actually wasn’t loading at all. It turned out that the home page of this website had 25 MB (megabytes) of images. 25 MB of images is like trying to park a semitrailer into a park in a parking spot designed for a mini, there is just no way that will that work.
Do I need images on my website?
Yes absolutely.
The brain processes images so much faster than words so images are really important to your website just be careful of the size of files you are uploading.
