Webmasters and developers are required to formulate and implement the best strategies on their websites to make them work well and grow in this digital age. Over the web, the competition is quite tough, and in order to satisfy the audience, you need to get your site in the perfect form from all angles. Search engine optimization is the best way to make your website stand out from others. By following the SEO guidelines, you can come into the good books of search engines, which will result in earning you a top spot on SERP. However, this journey isn’t a cakewalk, as it involves several intricacies.
One of the major factors that play a decisive role in your site’s success is loading speed. If you’re aware of SEO standards, you must know that the sites taking too long to load have to face the loss of ranking and traffic. Hence, the best way to prevent this from happening is by using the perfect image format. If the visuals uploaded on your site are not in the right format, it will negatively affect its loading speed.
You might be wondering about how different image formats impact your websites. If yes, then we will let you know about the effects of different image formats on the working of sites. Also, you will be able to figure out which is the best image format to rely on. So continue reading it till the end to clear all your worries and improve your website’s performance.
How Different Image Formats Impact Your Website?
The availability of different image file formats confuses people and makes it hard for them to decide which is the best format to use for the proper functioning of websites. Let’s take you through each image format and discuss their impact on a site.
JPG/JPEG
JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, and it came to life back in 1986. It is the most widely used image format due to its ability to display millions of colors. JPEG is known for its lossy compression mechanism, and people rely on it to upload digital images on websites, as this format makes the file smaller in size. JPEG image format has a positive impact on your website due to its universal support and compression attributes. Your website can face a serious issue in terms of performance due to the large size of images uploaded on it. You can discard this hassle by using an image compressor and compress JPEG image size without affecting its quality. The image compressor is an advanced utility designed for this specific reason. It will save your website from high bounce-back rate and improve its performance.
GIF
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and it’s pronounced as “JIFF.” GIFs stand out from other image formats when it comes to displaying animation. However, it is not a suitable format for complex images, as it only supports up to 256 colors. A GIF is made up of several frames that negatively impact your website’s speed, as it puts a great weight. The usage of GIFs on your website should be limited, and they must only be used when there’s no other possible way of displaying animations.
PNG
PNG is an abbreviation of Portable Network Graphics, and this format also supports millions of colors like JPEG. PNG works on lossless compression. Webmasters and bloggers prefer PNG image format for uploading visual content on their sites. PNG files are great for uploading transparent images on the web, as they perfectly display the data and elements contained in them. However, if a PNG file contains a lot of color data, it will result in increasing the size, which negatively impacts your website’s speed. This format is most widely used for screenshots where the transitions between colors need to remain sharp. While uploading screenshots on your website, you often desire to show some specific object or areas instead of the entire picture. In this case, you can resize image by getting assistance from an image resizer. The use of online photo resizer will make image resizing process hassle-free.
What is the Best Image Format for Uploading Visuals on a Website?
After going through the file formats discussed above, you may have figured out how each of them can impact your website. PNG is the best format for transparent images, whereas JPG is perfect for portraying a compressed version of images containing millions of colors.
That’s it!
The image formats discussed in this blog are the best ones to rely on for uploading images over the web. You can also find other formats like TIFF, SVG, PSD, RAW, etc., but they come with a lot of limitations. In our opinion, you should use any of the file formats discussed above as per the situation. In any case, the image file must not be heavy in size, as the functionality of the website gets disrupted, and it annoys both the audience and search engines. The usage of online utilities like image compressor and image resizer can be of great use to manage image files before uploading them over the web. By using these online tools, you can save yourself from the hassle of manual procedures.