A photographer’s website is bound to be full of high-quality images. Heavy use of images on a website has the potential of slowing down the website. There are different ways in which a website could be made faster while maintaining the usage of images. The first step to making a website load more quickly is to optimize the pictures used. This involves ensuring that the images used on the website follow the correct format and size. The most appropriate format to use in optimizing website images is the WebP image format. The next thing to do to make the website is to implement lazy images (Bendell et al., 2016). In this method, the website is designed to load text first, and then the images are loaded once they enter the viewpoint on the screen. Lazy loading is a vital website speed optimization technique for websites that have a lot of pictures.
Most internet users access websites through mobile devices. As a result, it is essential that a website is responsive and designed to support mobile devices. A drawback with mobile devices is low processing power and the use of slow networks. Therefore, the photography website should be designed to be able to switch and use responsive images. This can be achieved using responsive image tags alongside different variants of the same image. Therefore, a browser will load another image relative to the screen size. Furthermore, it is crucial to use the correct values for the image alt attribute to get faster load times. Proper image SEO, which includes appropriate use of alt text attributes, will improve load speeds.
The website should also be designed to leverage caching of the images and other static resources on the browser. Once a user visits the website, the images will be cached and reduce server requests making the website load faster (Bendell et al., 2016). The last method to help an image-heavy website load more quickly is through hosting the website images on a Content Delivery Network. A CDN makes use of global caching servers, which store files closer to users making websites load faster. This is how streaming services can provide better and faster delivery of videos and images.
References
Bendell, C., Kadlec, T., Weiss, Y., Podjarny, G., Doyle, N., & McCall, M. (2016). High Performance Images: Shrink, Load, and Deliver Images for Speed (1st ed.). O’Reilly Media.