CAMPBELL, Calif., April 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- As a social community, our appetite for images and peer-validation shows no signs of curbing any time in the near future. We've developed applications and services such as Yelp, Pinterest, and YouTube to help navigate through the thousands of choices and decisions we're faced with routinely. We express emotions through emoji, memes and selfies. It shows through the 350 Million photos that are posted every day to Facebook and 80 Million to Instagram. If you do the math, more pictures are taken every two minutes now, than were taken during the entire 1800s.
E-commerce businesses have started to communicate to their buyers in their own language; through imagery. Additionally, ones that focus on demonstrating product through quality user experience tend to have the highest converting websites. This includes the aesthetics and functionality of how a user can navigate through the site and layout, and the overall performance with which the content is delivered. The ability to crop with face and entropy detection, be responsive to device type, scale proportionally, filter, and more automatically with minimal engineering efforts can be a massive time saver for the digital business.
Just providing high-resolution images so users can see product details and usage scenarios will not guarantee a quality experience for visitors. You need to have the capacity to host the data for your image heavy site and the ability to resize on the fly for any device type and screen size. Otherwise network latency can cause loss of revenue, customer confidence and loyalty, and diminishing brand value. And a one-second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Here are 6 image optimization tips to help boost conversions:
Optimize images on your website
As a marketing, brand, or media specialist, it's obvious which medium your business should advantage of in order to edge out the competition. Optimization principles should rule your site's design. Images constitute 64% of an average web page, causing the delivery file size to be fatter than any other design aspect. Optimizing images is the easiest web performance task and will leave your images looking exactly the same while reducing the file size and improving download speeds by 50-80% on desktop and mobile.
Include high quality image
Using high-resolution photos assures the customer that the product or service that your business offers is also of quality. Sites that are poorly designed with pixelated images that load slowly are more likely to be considered unprofessional. When making online purchases, consumers prefer brands they know they can trust and professional photographs can deliver that confidence.
Provide a 360-degree product view
Changing the product view from multiple angles allows your buyers to zoom in on the product and really inspect their intended purchase top to bottom versus imagining a two-dimensional product in real life. If you can't touch and feel an item in person, this is the next best thing. Conversion rates for DueMaternity.com, an online retailer for pregnant women and new mothers, boosted conversions by 27% by switching to rotating 360-degree images.
Use Larger Images
According to a study by Forbes, hosting large, high-quality product images on your site is more important to 50% of online shoppers than product descriptions or peer reviews. You'd expect this to affect mobile shoppers, as responsive web design designers know that only 20% of visitors will take the time to scroll past the fold of their screen. However, when Skinner Auctions, of Antiques Roadshow, ran an A/B test blowing the images up on their catalog by 28%, 63% more visitors began bidding and 329% more visitors filled out the online form.
Play on the emotions of your shoppers
Images invoke emotions if you use them properly. The old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words is truer now more than ever. When a buyer departs from the landing page of your website after an average of 8 seconds, your homepage image should communicate your brand's message more clearly and succinctly than text. Users can tell when you're using stock photos, make sure you're tailoring the photo to the exact product to build trust with your audience.
Show your product in use
Providing context to the usage for the product in addition to the standalone product photo can help the customer to visualize the product in their real life, and encourage a faster buying cycle.
CDNetworks Cloud Image Optimization automatically optimizes images and renders websites to deliver the best quality possible, regardless of the device. It supports image intensive sites such as e-commerce and travel using responsive design or dynamic serving, and ensures a fast user experience whether accessed on a desktop, tablet or smartphone. CDNetworks can provide to you streamlined image storage in the cloud, easy cross-device optimization of images, and reduced site maintenance and authoring time to improve your site and reduce the amount of engineering. By using these best practices, you will improve user experience, confidence, and ultimately increase your business' bottom-line.
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