When preparing your images for the web it's important to keep in mind the performance and load time of your galleries and site pages. If you upload and add full resolution image files to your site galleries, it weighs down the load time and you'll have very slow galleries. The filesize is the main culprit for the performance, and the color profile can play an issue in the quality of your images after upload. We'll go over this in our recommendations below:
IMAGE DIMENSIONS
For the best performance we recommend resizing your images to no larger than 1920x1280. It's important that you export your images from your photo editing software with the sRGB color profile. This will ensure that your colors keep intact after you upload your images.
WORDPRESS DEFAULT IMAGE COMPRESSION
By default WordPress sets image quality to 80% to optimize the performance of the media load time. To change this default image compression we recommend installing a plugin like Super Simple Changes to automatically switch the 80% setting to 100%.
FILE SIZE
The dimensions of your images are important, but what is most important when considering the load time of your images and galleries on your site is the file size. We have compiled a list of our recommended apps to use to help reduce the file size of your images while keeping the quality of your images intact. 🙂
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Digital Downloads?
If you're offering digital downloads to your customers you will need to upload your full resolution images and then resize your images after upload under the Gallery > Manage Galleries area. Before uploading, make sure that 'resize on upload' is turned OFF and 'backup images' is turned ON under Gallery > Other Options > Image Options. To learn more about setting up your pricelists and options for Ecommerce, check out our documentation here.