How to handle images (lazy loading, compressing, caching...) to impact page load and thus SEO?

[Mat_C]

Hi all,

I am looking for a conclusive answer on how to handle images on Wordpress websites. Most of the time we encounter the same problems regarding images.

There are several options to make sure that images don't increase page load too much:

• Page caching and compressing: standard
• Lazy loading: helps decrease page load time, but Google might not crawl the images so not good for SEO. See this article on Googlebot scrolling.
• Correct image format (for example WebP): tried it several times and doesn't help much to decrease page load time.

What is best practice? Are there standards or preferred options for the image dimensions and quality (max height, width, number of pixels, rectangular or square) before you upload it, also regarding responsiveness? Is it better to use .jpg, .png or WebP?

To sum up, what should you do by default to handle images on websites so you can still have a good page speed even with loads of images?

Thanks for your answers!

[JordanLowry]

Image Format
I believe the preferred performance is WebP. But I usually try to use png over jpg.

Compressing Images
I think what might work best in your case is some sort of plugin like WP Smush. If you have a ton of images I'd invest in a tool or plugin that dynamically compresses images as they are uploaded to your site.

I like WP Smush because it also strips out the metadata associated with images along with compressing them.

If you have a ton of images it could be an attractive solution for you that you can scale.

Outside of another plugin, you could try some sort of cloud-based solution to dynamically compress images before you upload them.

I've tested an open-source image compression tool called Caesium in the past. This tool reduced some of my images by almost 40%. It performed better than the plugins I was using but I'm not so sure it would be a scaleable solution for you.

Out of curiosity, how bad are your load times? Are you currently running into site speed problems or are you trying to make incremental improvements?