It’s a balance between high-quality and ‘data light’
Mastering the art of optimising images is an important factor for online retailers. We talk to Heath Kane, founder and CEO of online marketplace Loubilou, about how he manages this issue.
The advice that most ecommerce entrepreneurs will give you when talking about site design is use plenty of images. Having an ecommerce site full of big, beautiful product imagery will show off your fantastic offerings and boost those all important sales. But it is a balancing act.
Having too many beefy images can damage your site’s loading times if they are not optimised properly.
“The use of high quality imagery is something of a double edge sword for any online seller,” says Heath Kane, CEO and founder of online marketplace Loubilou.
“Whilst it’s vital if you want to successfully sell your products you need high-quality images – it can be the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity – however, as users, if the image is too large and takes too long to download we might simply give up waiting.”
According to research, consumers will wait about three seconds for a website to load on a desktop and about five seconds on a laptop. Not only is it important to get your image sizes right for your customers – Google also uses page load time as a factor in its ranking algorithm.
“On Loubilou, we’ve created guidelines to help our sellers to find what we hope is the perfect balance,” says Kane.
“Added to this mix we’ve implemented clever technology to automatically optimise imagery across our platforms. This has proven to be a big advantage, as it enables us to get the right balance of size and quality by delivering images that adapt automatically to either our web site or mobile.”
There are plenty of image optimisation tools which can be found online. JPEGmini.com is one easy to use example.
Mobile optimisation
“Even with the rise of ‘responsive design’ mobile is often the last thing to be looked it,” says Kane. “Without the right thinking, images can get tangled between platforms. In other words, what works on one platform isn’t necessarily going to work on the other.
“Moreover, with a the advent of Apple’s impressive ‘retina screen’ conventionally saved web images (at 72dpi) can often look poor quality. To make full use of this technology often requires increasing the DPI (dots per inch) resolution – that results in file size increase.
“The problem this can create however, is unless a user is connected to a broadband/4G connection, the internet speed offered by 3G and Edge can make it frustrating for the user to wait around for it to load.”
Serving the best possible images to the majority of your customers is important. This is where researching your customer base could come in handy. See where your customers are coming from – how are they accessing your site? If you want to try creating optimised images for the ‘retina screen’ do so but keep a close eye on your analytics.
“Site owners need to be mindful of the differences and the hurdles that they need to overcome when creating multi-platform strategies,” says Kane.
“There’s nothing anyone can do to improve 3G technology. Owners need to be thoughtful how they approach mobile. It’s too tempting to make rich imagery that works well on retina display.
“The trick however is not overdoing it – where the images become too large to download. Therefore they need to think of a clever way of meeting both requirements. One way to do this is use slighter high DPI ratios but use better compression or slightly smaller image sizes.”
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