Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitespeed: Do images require width and height attributes?
-
Currently working on a sitespeed issue, and was wondering if not having width and height for images actually do cause a problem. We simply Photoshop the resolution we require for the image and add it to the page as is. I though this would actually speed it up, but I am getting from www.gtmetrix.com that we should have them.
What's your experience? Thanks!
-
Just came across a terrific resource that reminded me you'd asked about further reading, Ben.
Check out BrowserDiet for a huge collection of resources about tuning front-end performance of websites. (You'll see #6 talks about exactly your original question)
I can also recommend reading Steve Souder's two books - High Performance Websites and Even Faster Websites - both from O'Reilly. Souders is pretty much the leading specialist in this area. He's the creator of YSlow, one of the primary tools for measuring/analyzing site speed, and is now Head Performance Engineer at Google. His website is SteveSouders.com
That'll be more than enough to get you started. Lemme know if you're still hungry for more!
Paul
P.S. The report details from tests at webpagetest.org can also teach you a huge amount, and there's a forum there run by Patrick Meenan (who built webpagetest) which is just excellent. Patrick frequently answers questions personally.
-
you're welcome, hope your site will be speeding up a lot!!!
-
Yes, thank you. We size them all to what we want on the site so we are good there. Just got done doing it, and it did make a difference. Thanks guys!
-
as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.
An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.
-
Perfect-O! I completely get it now. Thanks Paul. You da man!
I thought it would be faster as in my mind it was more to read, but now that I understand the loading, I get it. Guess I need to start researching how a website loads. Have any resources I can read, to up my experience with this?
I've been in development but on an application side not website side.
-
The main reason PageSpeed and YSlow recommend including width and height for images is as much the perception of page speed as the actual load time, Ben.
When you include the image dimensions, the browser can draw out the "containers" that will hold the images, reserving the space for them while they download. The browser can then go on the paint the rest of the pages CSS and objects around those "containers" without having to go back and redraw the whole page once the images have downloaded and their sizes are then known.
This gives the user the illusion of a much faster, cleaner page load, and hence the impression of a faster website.
Does that make sense?
Paul
[Edited to add: You should still keep doing what you're doing to produce "size-as" images for your pages. You don't want to be resizing images with the html dimensions, just reporting in html the actual size of the image]
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why are my site images hosted by secureservercdn.net?
All of my image links are hosted on secureservercdn.net. for example, if i go to a webpage, mydomain.com/blog/blog-post and right click any image with a "copy image address" the images are all linking to secureservercdn.net/blablabla rather than mydomain.com/wp-uploads/blalblabla. this cannot be good for SEO. Any ideas why this would be? My site is hosted through GoDaddy, is it on their end? Thanks, Ryan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanMeighan0 -
Image Audit: Getting a list of *ALL* Images on a Site?
Hello! We are doing an image optimization audit, and are therefore trying to find a way to get a list of all images on a site. Screaming Frog seems like a great place to start (as per this helpful article: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/ugc/how-to-perform-an-image-optimization-audit), but unfortunately, it doesn't include images in CSS. 😞 Does the community have any ideas for how we try to otherwise get list of images? Thanks in advance for any tips/advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mirabile0 -
Thought FRED penalty - Now see new spammy image backlinks what to do?
Hi, So starting about March 9 I started seeing huge losses in ranking for a client. These rankings continue to drop every week since and we changed nothing on the site. At first I thought it must be the FRED update, so we have started rewriting and adding product descriptions to our pages (which is a good thing regardless). I also checked our backlink profile using OSE on MOZ and still saw the few linking root domains we had. Another Odd thing on this is that webmasters tools showed many more domains. So today I bought a subscriptions to ahrefs and instantly saw that on the same timeline (starting March 1 2017) until now, we have literally doubled in inbound links from very spammy type sites. BUT the incoming links are not to content, people seem to be ripping off our images. So my question is, do spammy inbound image links count against us the same as if someone linked actual written content or non image urls? Is FRED something I should still be looking into? Should i disavow a list of inbound image links? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy0 -
Any tips on how tp get reddit or pinterest posts rank high on google images?
Hello I have noticed that for a keyword that has high competition it has on top image searches not that popular pinterest post & a reddit post, explorergram , youtube etc., the keywork is "24k gold iphone" and I am wondering if I could create somehow myself a pinterest or reddit post or something similar that would have images with my product rank high on that keyword, since my website does not rank well in mage search for some reason... https://www.google.fi/search?q=24k+gold+iphone+6&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMI1f2LkpTxxgIVhI8sCh1SGwjy&biw=978&bih=550#tbm=isch&q=24k+gold+iphone thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bidilover0 -
Alt tag for src='blank.gif' on lazy load images
I didn't find an answer on a search on this, so maybe someone here has faced this before. I am loading 20 images that are in the viewport and a bit below. The next 80 images I want to 'lazy-load'. They therefore are seen by the bot as a blank.gif file. However, I would like to get some credit for them by giving a description in the alt tag. Is that a no-no? If not, do they all have to be the same alt description since the src name is the same? I don't want to mess things up with Google by being too aggressive, but at the same time those are valid images once they are lazy loaded, so would like to get some credit for them. Thanks! Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Attribution of port number to canonical links...ok?
Hi all A query has recently been raised internally with regard to the use of canonical links. Due to CMS limitations with a client who's CMS is managed by a third party agency, canonical links are currently output with the port number attributed, e.g. example.com/page:80 ...as opposed to the correct absolute URL: example.com/page Note port number are not attributed to the actual page URLs. We have been advised that this canonical link functionality cannot be amended at present. My personal interpretation of canonical link requirements is that such a link should exactly match the absolute URL of the intended destination page, my query is does this extend to the attribution of port number to URLs. Is the likely impact of the inclusion of such potentially incorrect URLs likely to be the same as purely incorrect canonical links. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 26ryan0 -
Getting Pages Requiring Login Indexed
Somehow certain newspapers' webpages show up in the index but require login. My client has a whole section of the site that requires a login (registration is free), and we'd love to get that content indexed. The developer offered to remove the login requirement for specific user agents (eg Googlebot, et al.). I am afraid this might get us penalized. Any insight?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Will having image lightbox with content on a web page SEO friendly?
This website is done in CMS. Will having lightbox pop up with content be SEO friendly? If you go to the web page and click on the images at the bottom of the page. There are lightbox that will display information. Will these lightbox content information be crawl by Google? Will it be consider as content for the url http://jennlee.com/portfolio/bran.. Thanks, John
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VizionSEO990