Consumer media consumption is rapidly shifting from text to visual images. Website content that includes compelling images averages nearly twice as many views as text, and four times as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it.
There has been explosive growth in the adoption of visual media to dramatically improve online user experience, resulting in higher engagement and conversions. However, visual media can also weigh down your web pages, increase page load times, deflate your search rankings and turn visitors away. There has been an 85% increase in page weight over the past three years, and 75% of today’s websites are images and video, thus making the tradeoff between speed and engagement a tough one. Particularly, as Google is placing more emphasis on page load speed – particularly for mobile users – as a search ranking factor.
This whitepaper examines the importance of visual media to your online publishing and marketing efforts, and how you can reconcile the ‘need for speed’ with the need to provide an engaging site experience to your visitors and potential customers. The whitepaper offers numerous best practices for optimizing visual media on your websites, enabling you to provide both a fast and engaging online experience to your target audiences.