Image Optimization for Digital Publications

Written by Matt Berringer

August 15, 2022

A web user’s impression of your website influences how likely they are to stick around and make a purchase. The images you display on your site play a major role in this perception. While under-optimized images can make your website appear substandard, they can also bog down loading speed, leading to poor overall performance. As a result, visitors may leave your site.

You can minimize the risk of losing shoppers to poor user experiences when you optimize images for the web. Digital publishing image optimization is the process of reducing an image’s file size without sacrificing quality to minimize load times for your web pages.

This guide will teach you how to optimize your images and improve your website’s performance.

How to Optimize Images for Performance

Optimizing images on your website does more than just enhance the site’s appearance. Digital magazine image optimization also improves site speed, search engine rankings and browsing experiences. These factors significantly impact how audiences perceive your business and how likely they are to convert.

When you attempt to optimize your images, the goal is to find a good balance between the smallest file size and the most acceptable image quality. There are numerous measures you can take to optimize your images for the web, leading to greater site performance.

Choose the Right File Format

Before you begin modifying your images, make sure you’ve chosen an appropriate file format. The primary file types you can choose from include:

• JPEG: JPEGs are among the most popular file types due to their compression capabilities and universal browser support. You can compress these images considerably for a good balance of file size and image quality.
• PNG: PNGs produce high-quality images, though their file sizes are on the larger side. These files have high readability and color contrast and do not degrade with each resave.
• GIF: GIFs are lower in quality than other file types and have limited color options, making them useful for simpler images and animations.

While these aren’t the only file formats you can choose from, they are better supported than other file options like WebP, TIFF and HEIF. In most cases, JPEGs are your best choice, as they deliver high image quality for small file sizes.

Use High-Quality Images With the Right Dimensions

It’s vital to choose high-quality images for your website. In most cases, the ideal image resolution for the web is 72 pixels per inch (ppi) because these images appear clearly on computer screens and are lightweight for faster loading. Anything below 72 pixels will look fuzzy, while anything above may slow your loading speed.

Once you have a high-quality photo, it’s important to choose the proper dimensions. While using larger images for your publication can be visually appealing, they can increase page load times. Even if you choose a large image and shrink the dimensions to improve loading speed, the image will still slow your performance because it is associated with a large file size.

The best thing to do is make the image smaller and allow web users to view it as a larger image in a pop-up.

Give Yourself Options, From Close-Ups to Action Shots

Using all the same types of photos on your digital magazine can get visually monotonous for the reader, which is why you should consider using different image types to improve user experience. Consider using close-up photos for images with minute details, such as small products like jewelry, and action shots, such as lifestyle photos, to show products in action.

You can also include images of different product angles and create unique alt attributes for each shot. Alt attributes are text alternatives to photos that feature relevant keywords related to those images. This strategy can improve search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing the likelihood that more users will land on your site when they search these terms.

Image Optimization Tools

Now that you know how to optimize images for your digital publications, you can start with an image optimization program. There’s no shortage of tools you can use to modify your photos. Some of the most popular include:

• Adobe Photoshop.
• JPEG Optimizer.
• Optimizilla.
• Trimage.
• TinyPNG.
• Compressor.io.
• Kraken.
• ImageRecycle.
• CompressNow.
• GiftOfSpeed.

Choose the Right Digital Publishing Image Optimization Platform

You can engage your audience with high-quality content when you optimize your web images with Nxtbook Media. We offer two innovative platforms — PageRaft allows you to create interactive content experiences directly through theplatform, while nxtbook transforms your PDFs into high-resolution content. With more than 15 years of digital publishing experience and over 40 awards under our belts, we’re the experts you can trust.

Contact us to learn more about our products today!