Any disadvantages of employing additional images which open in new window? Will it impact bounce rate and rankings?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

Our website is all about our software product. Generally our website pages are filled with 3 to 6 screenshots of our product features. As Google recently shifting to mobile index and pageload speed is going to be priority, we decided to compress the images on our pages and show the same images of large size in new window when someone clicks on a image. I wonder if this helps or has any disadvantages? Users may click on these clickable images while browsing the pages and may shift to new window to view the image. Will this have any negative impact on bounce rate? Please share your thoughts.

Thanks

[AndyMozster]

Can't speak to the new window issue, sorry.

However, I'm not sure you want to do that in the first place. The described flow (or lack of it) did alarm me from a usability angle. Surely its better to pop these large images up in a light box, so the user is least inconvenienced? There's some really neat lightbox JavaScript out there, e.g. https://noelboss.github.io/featherlight/ or http://www.digitalia.be/software/slimbox2/ 

Additionally resizing your images can have a great impact, but don't forget to optmise them with something like https://tinypng.com/. Do multiple passes on that to squeeze extra percentages out - just drag the download link back to the optimisation window till you only get a couple of % saving (or you wreck your image . If your workflow includes lots of new images regularly, consider a server side automated version, or Photoshop plugin to include it in image creation workflow.

Also if the brand/style guide allows consider going black and white or your preview images, or blurring them slightly - all little tricks to get image sizes really small. Also cache those images!