Automatic Image Compression and Conversion
Midway through our process, I noticed web traffic to some of our users’ sites decreasing. Google Search Console Data for each site showed an increasing number of pages that Google no longer considered “Good URLs” due to their slow loading times, which led to lower SEO rankings and decreased traffic.
Google had released new website performance standards, Core Web Vitals, that required websites to load in an average of 2.5 seconds. Only 33% of all websites currently meet these standards (according to ahrefs), and even fewer meet these standards when it comes to mobile.
The biggest culprit? Images. Multiple images increase the amount of data that must be loaded on a webpage and significantly slow down site loading times. To address this issue, some websites opt to remove images altogether, leaving a huge wall of text for visitors to read. One of our customers resorted to using an online image compressor. However, it was incredibly time-consuming to upload and compress images, then download the compressed images and insert them into his website. On top of that, it did not compress the images enough to bring load times below the required threshold.
To fix this issue and compress images enough that even mobile versions of pages pass Core Web Vitals, I made our software not only compress images but also convert images to Google’s new image format WebP, which uses significantly less space.
We knew that a significant number of our customers drafted their blogs in Google Docs first, then copied and pasted their content over to their sites. I worked with our engineering team to ensure that all images copied and pasted into our text editor were also compressed, converted, and re-inserted into the site.
I made all compression and conversion happen automatically for all users. Even users who were unaware of image compression and its effect on Google rankings still benefit from it today.