Top 5 Strategies to Optimize Images for Online Magazines

Online magazines are the staple of the modern media landscape. It’s where you can find the news and information you need about anything and everything. 

The images that digital publishing companies use in online magazines are among the most significant factors in how many people will read them. Large, high-resolution images can slow down your website and drive away potential readers. In contrast, low-quality, grainy images deter readers from consuming the amazing content your writers and editors have prepared. 

That is why image optimization is essential to running an online magazine. You want to make sure that you’re using the best quality images, but you also want to ensure that those images are optimized for the web so that they don’t take up too much space and slow down your website’s load time. 

Why is image optimization important?

Properly optimized images can improve your online magazine website’s performance and provide a better experience for your customers.

The internet is full of images – over 750 billion. On average, an image file can take up 50 – 70% of any given web page’s total size – before any other content like text or code gets added. 

So if you want your online magazine to load quickly and look great while people are browsing it, it is essential to know how to optimize your brand’s images. 

1. Choose the right image file format

JPEG and PNG are the most common image file formats for the web. JPEGs are better for photographs, while PNGs are better for graphics and images with transparent backgrounds. But on the web, modern image formats offer smaller file sizes without compromising on quality, such as WebP and AVIF.

2. Compress images

Image compression is essential to keep the file size small. Good compression technologies help reduce the file size of your images without significantly affecting their quality. This can greatly improve the performance of your website while ensuring the same, quality experience for your users. 

3. Use responsive images

Responsive images are incredibly and increasingly a must-have for online magazines and digital publishing industries. Nowadays, people no longer keep to a single device for surfing news but can do so on their laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. Hence, responsive images that can automatically adjust to the size of the device they are being viewed on ensure that images look good on different screens and will load quickly. To implement responsive images, you can use the srcset and sizes attributes on your website. 

4. Use lazy loading

Rather than loading all the images on your page at once, lazy loading is a technique that delays the loading of images until they are visible on screen. This improves the performance of your website, especially when online magazines have numerous photographs that complement news articles on a single page. Companies can use the loading attribute to implement lazy loading.

5. Include image alt tags

All images on your online magazine should have alt text. This is especially important for pictures with people in them – because it helps search engines figure out what they’re looking at when someone searches for that person’s name or title. Digital content editors must ensure that alt tags are descriptive and keyword-rich for all images, which are essential for accessibility and search engine optimization. For example, sports news featuring athletes like “Cristiano Ronaldo” in photographs should have his name within their alt tags.

Start optimizing your images for your online magazine

In conclusion, digital publishers must invest time and effort into optimizing their images to deliver better user experiences. Every day, as your editorial team continually adds new stories and pictures to your website, there is no better time than now to optimize your images!