The #1 thing your customers want is more product photography. So make it count!. Since images are the first thing your customer sees when looking at a product page and those first few seconds can be crucial in determining if they will click on 'Add to cart' and 'initiate checkout'.
Multiple studies have shown that high-quality product images have a direct correlation with conversion rate, return rate, checkout abandonment, and many other eCommerce specific performance metrics such as customer loyalty and brand awareness. With that in mind, let's go over how you can ensure your Shopify store has professional-quality and optimised photography.
Everything starts with taking the right picture.
You can create your own DIY photography setup that will do the job and use tools like Canva or Pixlr that can help you create high-quality images with little design experience. or
On a small volume, the most effective is to outsource the shooting on a price-per-image basis to a professional product photography company. In fact, this can actually save you money and time. As you can focus on other aspects of like Facebook and Google Ads.
Optimizing Images & Photos: A quick guide
1. Start with great photos
High-quality photos of products showing customers that you are serious about your business. But, great product photos don’t mean anything if they take too much time to load, in that case, your bounce rate would be off the charts. Be careful about images size, if a customer has to wait for more than 2 seconds to load a photo you will lose your game.
2. Use a minimalistic background for your product
- Your product should be in focus.
- Try not to put too many visual elements in one photo, just one main, which is your product.
- The background should be solid, white, grey, or light-coloured.
- You may brighten the background and remove any shadows, but don’t edit the photos too much, products have to look the same as they are in reality
3. Showcase your products with multiple angles
The more visual information a potential customer has, the more they are willing to buy it. Different photos can help showcase different aspects:
- Long-shots helps the user visualize how the product will look in a real-life situation.
- Medium shots help them ascertain the overall look of the product.
- Close-ups details the finer aspect and quality of the product.
4. Keep the consistency across all the photos
Plan in detail what every set of photos should look like, from the background to the lighting, editing and the creation of a unique template. Every product should be photographed in the same way and conditions. When all product photos are similar, a customer can easily scan through your pages and pick out the product they are looking for.
Optimising image content for Search engines - A quick SEO guide
Here are some basic checks that you should comply with in order to get the most out of your image content.
1. Use informative filenames
Image titles like ”image01.jpg” don't help Google or consumers. When naming photos, use words that describe the image clearly. Avoid making too long file names and stuffing them with keywords because they could have a negative impact on your ranking.
2. Include appropriate alt text
Search engines have a hard time interpreting images, they depend mostly on file (images) names and the alternative text. The purpose of the alt text is to describe images to Google or other search engines so they can understand them.
3. Improve page load speeds by using the correct image format, and size
JPEG is the most frequently used file type for e-commerce stores because it allows high-quality photo previews with smaller file sizes. The smaller image file size can play a role in improving the page load speed. Significant page load times can decrease your ranking and can mean lost sales.
Finally, don't forget to optimize your images by compressing them. Image compression compresses an image size without sacrificing quality depending on the device the person is viewing the image from.
A few of the free image optimizer tools that you may use to compress the image:
- TinyJPG accepts WebP, JPEG and PNG images
- Compress now accepts JPG, JPEG, GIF & PNG
- Kraken.io offers both lossy and lossless compression
- Compressor.io - accepts WebP, JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF and offers both lossy and lossless compression
