Software as a Service (SaaS) is a competitive field of play. For companies that sell products in this terrain, building a unique selling point and maintaining a competitive advantage are both essential factors.
Considerable attention is rightfully given to products’ features, pricing models, intricacies, long-term benefits, and use cases. However, one vital aspect – as far as top-of-the-funnel marketing strategies are concerned – concerns product imagery, which is invariably the first element that many prospective customers see when perusing online marketplaces for the right SaaS products.
SaaS businesses, therefore, need to be cognizant of how their images are not just presented, but also optimized. Optimizing website images isn’t just a move that earns you aesthetic points; it’s a vital component of your online marketing strategy.
Why Image Optimization Matters for SaaS Businesses
You may be wondering how optimizing product images influences your online SaaS business. In the worlds of search engine optimization (SEO) and groundbreaking generative engine optimization (GEO), every piece of content – visual or not – carries immense weight.
Site Speed
Website owners are under increasing pressure to ensure their website loads quickly, as it’s now what users crave. Search engines, particularly Google, have made page speed a vital ranking factor as part of its evolving algorithm. As far back as 2018, Google introduced the “Speed Update”, explicitly stating page loading times as pivotal to earning higher mobile search rankings. As images are often larger and bulkier files, optimizing them alongside website code has become more important.
SaaS companies may find themselves showcasing their products on e-commerce pages, with high-quality product imagery, screenshots, product demonstrations, case studies and even immersive or interactive videos. As such, image optimization becomes even more critical, as these visuals and interactive elements can drastically slow down your site if not properly condensed or minified.
User Experience (UX) and Conversion Rates
Websites and images must load quickly but that should not come at the expense of their quality. Crisp, clear images are integral to user experience (UX), and if potential customers can quickly access and view product pages without extended delays or frustrating page errors, they are more likely to explore further. This could involve signing up for trials, requesting PDFs, downloading newsletters, or committing to purchases. Consequently, if pages load slowly, contain poorly optimized images, and don’t work correctly, bounce rates could be higher and, by extension, so could the number of basket abandonments and lost purchases.
Mobile Responsiveness
Most web traffic nowadays comes from mobile devices, and SaaS platforms are no strangers to this growing influx of mobile users. As such, image optimization plays a pivotal role in ensuring websites are responsive across a range of screen sizes. Responsive images adapt seamlessly to different mobile and desktop devices, including tablets, retaining consistent quality without affecting load times or user experience.
How to Achieve Image Optimization
1. Use Professional Images
While this doesn’t necessarily mandate the need for professional photography equipment, using high-resolution displays, proper lighting and resolution, and decluttering should be done as a minimum.
2. Choose the Right Image File Format
The right file format can influence both the quality and size of your images. Consider the following options:
- JPEG: This file type is best for photographs and complex images with many colors, often providing sufficient quality and a respectable file size.
- PNG: PNG images are ideal for graphics with fewer colors that require transparency or have text overlays.
- SVG: These files are perfect for business logos and icons, as they scale without losing quality and typically do not take up much storage space.
- WebP: This modern format offers better compression than JPEG or PNG files while preserving a high level of quality. Despite this, some browsers may not be compatible.
3. Compress Images Without Sacrificing Quality
Image compression is essential for reducing file sizes without noticeably affecting their visual quality and sharpness. Online tools like TinyJPG or Compressor.io can be a cost-efficient and time-saving option, while in-house marketing teams can also leverage Adobe Photoshop’s “Save for Web” feature or command-line tools like ImageMagick for batch processing.
As a general guide, most web images can afford to be compressed by 60-80% without any visual degradation being overly noticeable.
4. Resize Images Appropriately
A common mistake many site owners make is uploading images much larger than is necessary. Therefore, resizing images to the largest size that your website can hold is a common prevention method. For example, if your content display area is 1000 pixels wide, uploading an image with a width of 1500 pixels isn’t necessary. Consider using Photoshop or other editors like Canva to resize images appropriately before uploading them to your site’s media library and clogging up unnecessary space.
5. Implement Responsive Images
Use HTML5’s <picture> element and srcset attributes to serve different image sizes based on the user’s device and screen size.
This ensures that any mobile users accessing your site aren’t downloading unnecessarily large images, while desktop users can still see high-quality visuals.
See the example below:
<picture>
<source media=”(max-width: 799px)” srcset=”mobile-image.jpg”>
<source media=”(min-width: 800px)” srcset=”desktop-image.jpg”>
<img src=”fallback-image.jpg” alt=”Description of the image”>
</picture>
6. Deploy Enterprise-Grade Browser Caching
Browser caching solutions can make it easier for returning website visitors to access pages and images they have already seen without re-downloading them again. This can drastically speed up load times for repeat visits. SaaS businesses should consider appropriate cache-control headers for image files if they want to improve load times on image-heavy websites.
7. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Speaking of improving load times, another option is to implement a CDN which can distribute images across multiple servers worldwide, serving them from locations closer to users’ browser servers. This reduces latency and distributes images much faster on average, which is particularly useful for global SaaS brands trying to reach international users.
8. Implement Lazy Loading
Lazy loading is a feature which can delay the loading of images that are not immediately visible to users on the first load of their screens. Essentially, it only loads the most essential images and content first, and only loads more as users scroll below the fold. For long, image-heavy pages or galleries, this can be particularly useful.
Consider the following JavaScript example on how to implement lazy loading. You’ll notice that this replaces the src attribute with the data-src value when the images enter the viewport.
<img src=”placeholder.jpg” data-src=”actual-image.jpg” class=”lazy” alt=”Description”>
9. Optimize Alt Text and File Names
This is not explicitly related to image size or load speed, but alt text and descriptive file names can improve user experience and, by extension, SEO efforts. Search engines cannot read images directly, and alt text is a good way to describe the image’s content so that, for example, users with visual impairments using screen readers, can assess what is on a webpage.
Including relevant keywords in file names (such as “saas-dashboard-analytics.jpg” instead of “IMG_123.jpg”) will also help.
Collectively, this will make your site more accessible and inclusive while giving search engines the best possible chance to rank your images in image search results.
Getting Started with Image Optimization
Optimizing images for your SaaS products is not an overly tall order and doesn’t require huge amounts of resources to get started.
As a key takeaway, consider these steps:
- Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to identify pages that are slow-loading.
- Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to assess whether pages and images could be better optimized.
- Audit your existing images and resize, compress, rename and add alt text to them as a priority.
- Minify JavaScript and CSS files to eliminate any unnecessary code.
- Implement lazy loading where applicable.
- Create a standard process for preparing and optimizing images before they’re uploaded, with relevant optimization steps included.
- Strategize for an overhaul of browser caching and possible CDN solutions to dispense images and content easier and faster to your users.
- Stay informed of new image formats and optimization techniques and adapt your strategy accordingly.
- Keep track of your page load times and user engagement metrics (like bounce rates, conversion rates and clicks) to measure the effectiveness of your optimization. Statistically, conversion rates are three times higher for e-commerce sites that load in one second.
Image optimization may sound like a convoluted and minimally impactful technique to improve visibility and UX for SaaS businesses trying to scale. However, over time, when executed correctly, you will notice a shift in how your customers respond to your site and interact with your products. Every nanosecond counts when it comes to marketing your products, and online users are notoriously time-stretched, so don’t let bulky images get in the way of getting your SaaS products noticed.
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