These days, improving your blog performance often comes down to speed. Audiences tend to be busy and looking for immediate results, meaning that online impatience can have a significant impact on whether anyone actually reads your carefully crafted articles.
Images are a huge part of a successful blog, and dense paragraphs of text just aren’t appealing. Even the most literary and academic bloggers will sprinkle a few photos and graphics throughout their writing to break up the text and improve their page’s aesthetics.
But using images on your blog can be tricky and can have some unintended side effects. Large, high-quality images, in particular, can have a real impact on your page speed, which can, in turn, be hugely damaging to your blog’s overall success.
So what is the deal with images and page speed, and how can image hosting services like ImageCoast help your blog succeed? Let’s take a look.
Page speed
Page speed is a pretty simple concept, it is just how fast your website pages load. Plenty of things influence your page speed, with big images playing an important part. Page speed is essential for two main reasons:
User experience – people tend to have relatively short attention spans online, and sites that load slowly usually have a poor bounce rate, as their audience doesn’t stick around and goes elsewhere for content.
SEO performance – page speed is one of the main factors that Google looks at when ranking sites in their search results. Slow websites have bad SEO, which means less traffic.
How image hosting can help
At this point, you might be thinking that it’s best not to use high-quality images at all and to stick to text and smaller graphics wherever possible. But this would be depriving your blog of some of its most attractive elements and failing to take advantage of all the opportunities available to you.
Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, try an image hosting service like ImageCoast to host your photos, graphics, and pictures, rather than hosting them on your blog’s server. This frees up vast amounts of bandwidth for your blog to do its thing and allows you to hotlink as many high-quality images as your hosting provider provides without impacting on page speed, user experience, or SEO performance.
To find out more about how image hosting can take your blog to the next level, get in touch with ImageCoast and find a hosting package that’s right for you!