How to Optimize Shopify Images for Performance

Boost your Shopify store's SEO and load times with optimized images! Learn how to do it in our latest blog post.

May 25, 2021

If your business is on Shopify, chances are you’ve got tons of product photos and have spent countless hours sorting through your product images to choose the very best ones. Every Shopify page needs product photos. Lifestyle photos. Marketing materials. Overall: this means your Shopify page carries a LOT of data. If your images aren’t optimized (we’ll get into precisely what that means) you could be losing customers. Studies show that customers are more likely to leave your website with every passing second of load time.

• SEO - search engine optimization. This term refers to anything that helps boost your website to the top of the search engine results. Google Analytics is a free tool that you can use to make sure the images and text on your website are searchable.

• alt text - alternate text. For every image you upload to Shopify: you have the option to add alt text. This means you describe the image in a text box. That alt text is attached to that image. The more descriptive and specific that alt text is, the more frequently your image will appear in searches.

• Image compression - the size and quality of any image affects the amount of data it holds. If you have huge original size high-quality images all over your Shopify, your load time may suffer. Image compression is the concept of minimizing the size (and therefore load time) of your image as much as you can without minimizing quality.

• Metrics - the numbers that tell you how well your business is doing. There are specific metrics that are most commonly used for e-comm businesses. The one we discuss the most here is conversion. In the context of this blog — your conversion is how many people came to your website to check it out and then actually bought something.

6 tips to ensure Shopify images are optimized

Test your page speed

How do you know if you’re losing customers over loading time? It’s not easy. Plenty of other factors can affect your conversion. But you can use a tool like Speed Boostr to check your time. There isn’t one hard and fast rule of how fast a website should load. You’ll have to do a balancing act of content vs. time. But remember: every second of load time will drop your conversion.

Studies show that customers want e-commerce sites (online stores) to load within two seconds.

Image naming convention

You may have a folder full of product images with names like “IMG_43892.jpg”. This is a common default.

For example: you sell customized stationery. What do you expect your customers to search in order to find products like yours? Try a tag formula like “your-keyword_here.jpg”.

Choose your image format

There are two primary image formats for Shopify: PNG and JPEG. PNG is higher-quality whereas JPEG is smaller (and therefore loads faster).

Reduce file size

Shopify will compress your images to some degree. As a general rule: aim for file sizes 70KB or less. The happy medium recommendation is 2048 x 2048.

Use alt img tags

Alt img tags are descriptors of the image they’re attached to. They’re used for accessibility purposes and search purposes. Your alt img tag should be cohesive and actually describe the photo it’s attached to in simple and thorough terms.

Define your own metrics

Because you have a brand: you also have the agency to make many decisions for your brand. Metrics are incredibly impactful decisions that you just have to make on your own.

4 best image optimization tools for Shopify

1. TinyIMG

This app provides image compression without loss of quality. It allows you to compress up to 50 images per month on the free plan.

2. SEO Suite

This app gives you an advanced analysis of your SEO on your pages.

3. Alt Text

This app gives you fill-in-the-blank alt text boxes to create easy and optimized alt text for your images.

4. Page Speed Image Optimizer

This app is customizable for a page-loading screen.