Senior Writer: Supriya Bajaj
Date: October 27, 2023Optimizing your photos can give your website the strategic that advantage many SaaS businesses need to crush their competitors. Optimized images will help you obtain higher search rankings, which means:
- More clicks
- More leads/sales
- More signups
And yet, how much effort do you pay to your SaaS products’ image, let alone optimizing it? Probably not a lot. As a result, you may be missing out on a substantial amount of business.
Why Do Search Engines Care About Page Loading Times?
In January 2018, Google announced that mobile search algorithms would begin to take page loading speeds into account. It was called the ‘speed update’.
Two things critically slow down page loading speeds:
- More use of javascript often caused by too many apps and not enough built-in to your website
- Images that are way too large and not optimized for various screen sizes
Regarding the latter, the widespread practice that adversely affects image loading time is that of using images that are wider than the content area within the page theme.
If the page is 1200 pixels wide and a webmaster uploads an image that is 2400 pixels wide, then readers will need to load more data than required, unnecessarily increasing the image and page loading times.
Page speed is critical for two key reasons:
Faster page speed leads to better user experience
Everyone loathes a website that takes forever to load. It can be infuriating, causing users to bounce off the site before the content even downloads.
Alternatively, a website that loads quickly lets the visitor peruse the content with ease.
The better the users’ experience, the more likely it is that the user will remain on the site and consuming its content, maybe even making a purchase or signing up.
Faster page speed leads to better Google ranking
Research has demonstrated that Google’s algorithm places a high priority on page speed when its search engine crawlers rank pages in results. Thus, if you wish for your website to rank higher in SERPs, you will have to check your page speed.
When it comes to SaaS businesses, way too many early-stage companies spend too little time focusing on excellent product photography and branded imagery.
You use your pictures everywhere-
- Product pages
- Category pages
- Homepage
- Abandoned cart messages
- Blogs
- Social media accounts
- Facebook advertising
Still, it is more of an afterthought despite being so crucial. Now, let’s see how you can optimize them:
How to Optimize Images
1. Start with good photos
Great SaaS photography begins with generating the right image.
Your SaaS photography doesn’t have to involve an expensive camera or setup. However, there are a few hacks you can follow to ensure you end up with the best quality photos:
- Use a consumer DSLR camera or smartphone
- Ensure that there is a good light source
- Use a white sweep to help diffuse the lighting
- Use a steady surface
- Use a camera tripod.
2. Showcase your products from multiple angles
Look at any successful SaaS company, and you will observe that their images include multiple angles or views.
SaaS product photography can be used to showcase the best aspects of the software, so it’s essential to include a variety of shots. Different photos can help showcase various aspects of the products which can be used for various purposes.
3. Use white backgrounds and screens for your software
Replacing the background of images with a white background will make sure that you have consistently great-looking pictures. Beyond just using white backgrounds, it’s also beneficial to utilize tools that can remove backgrounds from images. This ensures that product or software screenshots are presented with utmost clarity, free from any potential visual distraction
White backgrounds are standard on almost every website, and there are a few great reasons for that:
- Your images will look consistent on all pages
- It will save your money and time in editing
- You can easily replace or reuse the background on your photos
You can use software such as Autoclipping or Pixlr to manually remove the background from images of your product photos to create a white background.
4. Save your images with the correct dimensions
Paying attention to the dimension of your image is crucial:
- If they are too large, there will be issues with your page load time
- If they are too small, the images will look grainy and of poor quality
When your images are sufficiently large in dimension, then the same picture can be scaled down to be used in your thumbnails or collection images.
If you don’t have access to software that can resize your images, like Photoshop, services like Autoclipping and Canva can help you with basic editing and resizing needs.
5. Improve page load speeds by using correct image formats
It’s easy to choose the default save option when you’re creating your images, but knowing the difference between file formats and settings can have a massive impact on your site speed.
- GIF files are lower in quality, but more importantly, they are lower in file size. However, the perfect GIF generator tool can increase the quality of your GIF files.
- PNG files support a more extensive range of colors, and also the only format that supports transparent backgrounds. However, all this leads to a much larger file size. If you need to edit a photo multiple times, you’ll want to export it as a PNG file.
- JPEG images are the most common format used by digital cameras and online. They support a wide range of colors, but the JPEG compression settings allow you to determine a delicate balance between file size and image quality.
Wrapping Up:
Stellar photos create a great first impression. Customers respond more to what they see as opposed to what they read. It’s the first step to introducing your product to a potential buyer. Therefore, you do not want to undermine the importance of good pictures for marketing your product or service.
At the same time, even the most good-looking pictures will end up being useless if it slows your page down and does not show up in search rankings. We hope this guide will help you create the most optimal images for your website.
Supriya is a highly skilled content writer with over 8 years of experience in the SaaS domain. She believes in curating engaging, informative, and SEO-friendly content to simplify highly technical concepts. With an expansive portfolio of long-format blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, and case studies, Supriya is dedicated to staying in touch with emerging SaaS trends to produce relevant and reliable content.
