Imagery can do amazing things for your website if done correctly. Eye-catching imagery will help attract the attention of users and keep them engaged for longer. Social media posts and web pages are far more likely to be shared if they have an image than if they don’t.

Here’s some key things to consider when it comes to imagery:

On Brand.

Like with the tone of voice for content marketing, your images also need to reflect the brand. Corporate sites will need corporate imagery whereas something like a fashion blog will need Instagram filter-style, artistic pictures. Off brand imagery could be very damaging and turn users away from your site. You need to keep your brand consistent to build trust.

Unique imagery.

Users will prefer to see new imagery rather than the same generic photos from stock collections. Brand and company specific images will come across much better than purchased images. The images will be far more personable and reflective of you as a business or person.

Reflective Quality.

You can lose visitors and customers for poor imagery. Imagine a site with fuzzy product images? You wouldn’t buy from them and are far more likely to opt for the same product from a company with clear images.

Correct Size.

Resize your the height and width of your images so they are never larger than the largest size they will appear on your site. Wordpress is great for this as you can edit the image size directly in the back end. Responsive web design will then automatically scale this down.

Image File Size.

This is critical for your site. You cannot upload large file sizes to your website as this slows your page load time and speed of the whole site. If a page takes too long to load then a user will leave the site. A slow site speed is also a large red mark against the website in terms of SEO. A great tool to use is https://tinypng.com/ to reduce file size without compromising on image quality. Just upload your files and download the compressed version.

Search Engine Optimising.

If for some reason your images aren’t showing on the web page then there will be just the little descriptive text showing. Google uses this text to read what the image is about so it is a good spot to pop keywords in to give you page a boost for those words as search terms. To set this in the backend, you need to edit the ‘alt-tag’.