When it comes to building websites, especially in the landscape of the modern internet, you need to ensure optimization in addition to publishing to make your website seen. In this ShortPixel overview, we’ll go over one of these tools to optimize an area that often gets overlooked, your images.
Fortunately, there are also plenty of businesses and services that can be used to help craft the perfect webpage, with companies such as WordPress coming to mind.
However, by that same token, there is a slight drawback.
Because it is such a useful website builder that everyone knows about, everyone will be using it. This brings everything back to square one!
Because of this, using a reliable website builder is no longer enough.
If you need to get your excellently structured and written pages to stand out from the rest of the perfectly made pages, you will need extra tools to help service the content quickly as possible.
Besides introducing ShortPixel, we’ll also review some details you should keep in mind while using the service.
Table of Contents
What Is ShortPixel?
ShortPixel is a plugin that can be installed into sites such as WordPress, to optimize the use of any of the images you use on your web pages.
For example, ShortPixel can be used to resize images on your webiite better so that they have the least performance impact possible. The main feature that ShortPixel is known for is compressing images that a website uses more efficiently.
This helps the website load quicker for someone who is viewing it and helps ease the load that having images can have on a network provider.
This reducing and resizing process is generally known as image optimization.
Why Image Optimization Is Important
Now know what ShortPixel does, but why is loading an entire extra plugin into your website necessary? The plugin connects your website to the ShortPixel service so that your images are offloaded to their servers to make your website stand out from others.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For a search engine to bring up the web pages most relevant to your search, the software that powers engines such as Bing or Google will search for specific elements of a webpage that it deems important to the search that you have asked the search engine to make.
This is a core feature of many modern website designs, as the less optimized a webpage is, the further back in the search results it will turn up, meaning that fewer people will see it.
Let’s be honest, how many of us read past the fourth or third page of results on Google? Even as Google tests using a never ending results page, how far will you scroll down?
Those first two pages are where the most viewed results will be, so a webpage must be optimized enough to reach them.
Why Image Optimization Matters For SEO
So, what does all this have to do with image optimization?
Often, when we are discussing search engine optimization, we are referring to specific keywords that the search engine is likely to look at and the number of words on a webpage, as well as how they are structured
However, image optimization is an often underused tool that can seriously boost the SEO of your webpage.
For example, Google’s search algorithm will also factor in the loading speeds of web pages regarding the top result, and fast-loading pages tend to perform better.
As anyone who has been on a smaller bandwidth whilst loading a webpage will tell you, having a reduced loading time goes a long way to making sure that a viewer of a webpage stays engaged in a site for longer.
Rather than the person simply going back to the previous page and searching for a new website.
Not only that, but using less broadband to connect to a webpage is another aspect of SEO, so having compressed images that take up less bandwidth, which is another feature that ShortPixel helps optimize for your webpage.
How To Use/Install ShortPixel
So, now that we know why ShortPixel is helpful, it is time to show you how to install it into your WordPress website as a plugin.
Finding The Plugin
You can find the plugin in the WordPress repository on the ShortPixel page. You can also find information and a direct upload test at ShortPixel’s website.
Add The Plugins API Key
To make sure that ShortPixel works correctly with an account, you will have to add the API of your WordPress account to the ShortPixel account that you will need to set up.
If you find the plugin settings to ShortPixel, you should be able to copy and paste the API key of your WordPress account and have it validated.
From here, you’ll be good to start using ShortPixel!
Extra Details To Keep In Mind
- It is possible to exclude specific images on your webpage from being optimized. The ‘Exclusion’ tab of the plugin allows you to select images that the plugin will avoid compressing.
- There is a free plan of 100 credits or 500 MB of CDN traffic, although the paid plans can accommodate much larger visit numbers if your page is well optimized, even at the lowest level. Consider how much you think you’re prepared to pay for your website.
ShortPixel Overview – Final Thoughts
As you can see, ShortPixel is a small, yet highly effective tool that you can use in your quest to reach the front page of Google!