On AIP Support we have an article that discusses How to Add an Image using the Image Module. But before you even upload an image you’ll want to first make sure the size of the image is website friendly. What do we mean by this?
In order to get the best performance from your website you’ll want images that load fast, not slow down your website. Slow loading websites result in poor search ranks within search engines like Google. They also result in visitors leaving before your website even finishes loading.
So how what can we do to improve our images so they benefit our website? We can Resize, Optimize and Compress our images.
Below are some resources and suggestions on how to accomplish this.
Online Tools
ResizeImage is a free website you can use to edit your images in a number of ways. Simply upload the image you’d like to use, from there you can Resize, Rotate, Crop, Compress, Change the file format (e.x change an image from png to jpg) and much more.
Next, you’ll download your newly edited image and then upload it to your website.
Tools For Mac or Windows
If you do not wish to use the website mentioned above there are plenty of programs for both Mac and Windows you can download to achieve the same result. We’ll list a few paid and free tools.
Free Photo Editors
Apple comes with a free built-in tool you can use to edit images in all sorts of ways called Preview. You can learn more about the Preview tool here.
Windows also has a built-in tool called Photos. You can learn more about Photos here.
Some other programs you can consider are GIMP, Canva or Image Resizer for Windows 10
Paid Photo Editors
Of course you do also have the option to buy a more professional photo editing program to edit images. For both Mac and Windows there is Adobe PhotoShop. Some alternatives to Adobe you can check out are Acorn or Aurora
Final Recommendation
Now that you have chosen an option to edit your images you’re probably wondering, “What dimensions should the image be?” or “How small should the image file be?”
Image Size
To answer the first question, it all depends really on what you want to use the image for.
For example, for a logo you may not need it to be any larger than 200px tall. If you’re using the image for an About page then you’ll want the image to be a square (e.x 500px by 500px) For a background or slideshow you’ll want a larger image, perhaps 1,200px wide.
For a blog post, the most ideal WordPress featured image size is 1,200 x 628 pixels.
NOTE: You DO NOT need an image larger than 1,200px wide.
File Size
As far as file size goes, the smaller the better. Small file sizes results in faster website load times. That being said sometimes even after you resize an image and compress it, the file size is a bit large.
So a good rule to follow is, try and keep the file size in around 500kb or smaller if possible.