Image optimization is an art that you want to master.

What is image optimization?

Image optimization is about reducing the file size of your images as much as possible without sacrificing quality so that your page load times remain low. It’s also about image SEO. That is, getting your product images and decorative images to rank on Google and other image search engines.

  • Why is it that when I do a Google image search, my product photos never show up?
  • Do I need to add alt attributes to my images?
  • What’s the difference between JPEG, GIF and PNG? When should I use one over another?

It’s really easy to blow through hundreds of product shots and keep the default file names your camera assigns.

Name your images descriptively and in plain language

You could use the generic name your camera assigned to the image (e.g. DCMIMAGE10.jpg). However, it would be much better to name the file “picture of apple cut in half.jpg”.