By Rahul Nanwani, CEO & Co-Founder of ImageKit
Brand leaders have always understood the importance of leaving a mark on their customer’s minds which is most vital when it comes to exposure to the target audience. Though, there are many ways to ignite that imaginative spark for the brand, what’s more essential is the brand’s website presence for people to find a quick go-to place to explore it. While brands do understand the importance of having a website, they must also hold on to the fact that a website needs to be built keeping in mind the kind of engagement it can generate. What consumers of today want is swift load times and a hassle-free online experience.
As per a report by Brandwatch, there are about 3.2 billion images shared each day over the internet. With billions of images as well as videos created, processed, and consumed daily, these visual assets play a critical role in our day-to-day activities. In fact, the stock image market alone is valued to reach $4.7 trillion by 2027 globally. The global video streaming market on the other hand is projected to reach $149 billion by 2026. This asserts the importance of visuals & images and how they rule the cumbersome web business. It is critical for brands to understand that images are vital for their customers to comprehend their products and services which they find effortlessly on their websites. And for websites to be nimble, brands must adopt ways and means to ensure that they are augmenting them for the best user experience.
Image Optimisation and the consumer connect
Image optimization is enormously critical for brands who want to enhance their website’s user experience. To ensure that customers don’t lose interest in the brand, the leaders must strategize for a superfast, high-quality image loading experience with images optimized exactly for their devices. It is extremely imperative for brands to organize their website design keeping in mind how best they can utilise images to engage with their customers. Additionally, the importance of image optimization can also be assessed from the fact that it helps in connecting users with the brand in ways more than one can imagine.
Image Optimisation – the true savior for a website
There are various aspects to corroborate the fact that websites need proper image optimisation to become efficient for use by the customers. Not only does image optimisation help websites to become more user-friendly, but it also helps in generating brand recall value, since well-furnished websites tend to create a larger impact on the minds of their visitors in the long run. Here are some of the ways image optimisation helps websites.
Improved page speed
According to HTTP Archive, as of November 2018, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight. It is a proven fact that if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, users are more likely to ditch it. Thus, it is integral that brands, no matter how big or small, plan to have a proper image optimisation in place to ensure that today’s tech-savvy people, do not find your brand obsolete as they visit your webpage.
Unoptimized images can make any website slow to such an extent that users will take only a few seconds to leave it. On the other hand, well-optimised images will ensure that not only does the page load quickly, but also its images are well aligned and clear.
Enhanced User engagement
Best user engagement happens when your customers get everything quickly and clearly as they visit your website. If even once your website doesn’t load quickly, there are high chances that the user will shun it once and for all. Hence, user engagement can only be maintained when you have well optimised images on your website.
Real-time results
One another fact is that if your search ranking improves, it means you can capture more users, and perhaps your website will become more result oriented. There has been a lot of research by marketing leaders, including Kissmetrics, Moz, etc, about the relationship between conversions and page load speed. According to Kissmetrics, 79% of shoppers who are not satisfied with the web page speed or performance do not buy from the same site again.
Dynamic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
No one can deny the fact that SEO holds a crucial spot for every digital marketer out there. To become more and more visible, brands need to strengthen their SEO results. Who doesn’t want to get the top rankings for its website pages? And one of the factors for this is the load speed of your web page. Thus, image optimization helps in ensuring that your images rank in image searches on Google.
In a nutshell
Brands need robust strategies to establish themselves, then survive, and then eventually prosper. The very first thing that comes to mind when someone thinks of a brand is its website and the online presence, regardless of what industry they are into. Hence, it is as worth discussing in the boardroom as any other crucial business strategy with image optimisation being one of the key assets to yield the best results out of the website.
