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Site Optimization – Don’t Display Images that are Hosted Elsewhere

  • October 17, 2019
  • Bradley Taylor

One of the most important factors search engines consider when ranking your site is load speed. We have covered that before. But, today we want to go into the topic of serving images on your website.

You probably know by now that images on your website should be an optimized size so that they do not slow the page load speed when the site is visited. But, you should also make sure not to serve images from a server outside of the server from which your website is currently being stored.

Having images on your site that are being served from a different server can slow the load process tremendously. Also, search engines actually look for this and hold it against your ranking.

Most people don’t have to worry about this but if you are displaying an advertisement from another company and the image is served from their server, it is encumbering your site’s ranking.

Fixes

You can save the image that is being displayed for the advertisement on your server. Then you can edit the code to serve your image and still have the tracking link point to them. Make sure to talk this over with your advertiser so that they know why there will be zero “impressions” on their end from now on. You can explain to them it is bad for SEO.

Example:

Before

” <a href=”https://www.xyzcompany.com/trackingcode”><img src=”https://www.xyzcompany.com/images/example.gif” alt=”XYZ Company” border=”0″ /></a> ”

After

“<a href=”https://www.xyzcompany.com/trackingcode”><img src=”https://www.yoursite.com/images/example.gif” alt=”XYZ Company” border=”0″ /></a> ”

 

Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

If you have a WordPress site that has plenty of rich data on it, you may want to consider this step to speed the site up.

Download the plug-in called JETPACK. One of this plug-in’s free features is that it helps to improve your site’s load speed.

Jetpack accomplishes this by putting your images on their server network. Whenever a person visits your site, Jetpack serves images from the nearest server location in relation to that visitor. This service can help knock a second off your load time.

To use the feature, download JetPack and on the apps home screen you should see this option:

JetPack

Turn this feature on and you are all set to go.

Generally the rule of thumb is that any site which takes longer than 5 seconds to load is punished by the search engines and every second under that you are rewarded by the algorithm. But you have to be able to balance rich, healthy content with site load time. This goes for desktop and mobile site versions.

  • Brad