We all prefer to use images inside our article. Images are beneficial to describe what the author is trying to manifest inside an article. Displaying some images keep your readers more involved in the topic.

During content creation, when it comes to image optimization people usually suggest using proper alt text. However, optimizing an image is much more than just naming it and using suitable alt text.

Here in this article, you will read about five different techniques to optimize WordPress images which will help you to fix GTmetrix/Pingdom warnings as well as potentially rank images high up in the search engine.

While optimizing an image for SEO is necessary, optimizing that for page loading speed is the significant part. As a result of optimization, you will achieve better page speed and SEO result.

Pre-publishing Image Optimization:

It’s always better to optimize WordPress images before uploading them to the media gallery. You can take advantage of powerful tools like Photoshop or your favorite image editor.

Prepare the image nicely by cutting, resizing, compressing, and saving in a proper format (PNG/JPEG/GIF) before uploading. Don’t forget to give a descriptive filename to it.

Hint: If your website needs high-quality images (Example: Stock Photo Website, Photography Website, Travel Blog, etc) then optimization of images will not help you because it will reduce the quality as well.

---

#1. Find Unoptimized Images

After assigning the images into the published post, the post-publishing image optimization part will start. First of all, we have to scan and identify the problems with the uploaded images. There are tools like GTmetrix, Pingdom which can help you detect the problem with an image. GTmetrix shows the problem in details so I would recommend you test a particular page with GTmetrix.

Run your website through GTmetrix. As soon as the analysis is complete GTmetrix will display all the results regarding that page into two different tabs “Page Speed” and “Yslow”.

There are 7 types of image related problem can occur on a page. We will first try to solve the most important ones before heading towards the least cause problems.

• 1. Serve Scaled Image: Resize a large image into a correct dimension that your themes HTML & CSS specify.

• 2. Optimize Images: Compress the images losslessly.

• 3. Specify Image Dimension: Define the width and height of images in HTML or CSS

• 4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable: The preferred size of a favicon is 16x 16x.

• 5. Use a content delivery network (CDN): Serve images from a CDN url.

• 6. Leverage browser caching: Cache image files using a caching plugin.

• 7. Minimize Redirect: Serve images with proper HTTPS.

• 8. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite: Combine images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites.

GTmetrix will show image related test results like this:

---

#2. Serve Scaled Images

If you get a warning to serve scaled images by GTmetrix, this means that the page includes some oversized images. GTmetrix recommends you to resize them into the correct dimension (will be provided by GTmetrix) which matches with your theme design.

As soon as you resize the images into the recommended dimension the warning of serving scaled images will disappear. It will help you decrease the page size as well.

Resize The Images Manually:

In this case, you should be resizing the images manually. Using a plugin will not be helpful because every image is recommended to set in a different dimension.

You can use an online image editor to resize the images which are required. Open the editor iloveimg and upload the image file from your computer or you can download the original image from the GTmetrix link shown in the warning.

Caution: Do not change the image title.

Set the recommended dimensions inside the editor and resize the image and download the resized version.

Check the original file location in GTmetrix and now upload the resized image to that location using hosting file manager or any FTP client. You should see the overwrite confirmation popup while uploading the image and select confirm.

Resize and upload back all the images which required proper scaling. As soon as you finish the process recheck the page with GTmetrix and the warnings will disappear.

---

#2. Optimize Images

This warning usually appears when a page contains losslessly uncompressed images. Losslessly compressing an image will help to reduce the size of the image, resize image files themselves instead of via CSS, and most importantly decrease page loading time.

To fix this issue open the optimized image in a new tab which is recommended by GTmetrix and download it. Copy the original file name from GTmetrix (Image URL) and rename the downloaded file by pasting the copied name.

Now open your website file manager or use any FTP plugin and upload back the optimized images into the correct location (wp-content/uploads/date/….).

Hint: While uploading the optimized image to your file manager to replace the old image file you should get a “replace” confirmation.

Repeat the same procedure for all the unoptimized images. When finished re-test the page with GTmetrix and optimize images warning will be solved. Previously I have published a complete tutorial on image optimization. You can follow the procedure from there.

---

#3. Specify Image Dimension:

Specifying the width and height for the images (In HTML and CSS) enables faster rendering by rejecting the need for unnecessary repaints.

This warning appears when GTmetrix detects any image in your website doesn’t have width/height mentioned inside the HTML or CSS code. Some themes automatically attach the image dimension while some others don’t.

Visual editors and live page builders like Divi, Elementor allows you to specify image dimension so they can assist you to fix this problem.

If you don’t use visual editors then adding width/height in HTML code will end this warning. A great example of using dimensions in the WordPress widget area is:

---

#4. Make Favicon Small and Scalable:

Favicon is an icon connected with a web page. This little image remains in the “favicon.ico” file in the server’s root. During page load since the browser requests this .ico file, hence it needs to be present there.

Every time a browser requests this favicon file, the cookies for the server’s root are sent. So making the favicon small will help to reduce the cookie size for the server and improves performance the website as well.

Every time a browser requests this favicon file, the cookies for the server’s root are sent. So making the favicon small will help to reduce the cookie size for the server and improves performance the website as well.

You need to make sure that favicon size is 16x16px, and the file is in favicon.ico format, and is cached using cache plugin.

---

#5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)

CDN is a set of web servers distributed over multiple locations around the globe to deliver your contents more efficiently to the users. The advantage of having a CDN, it can provide an equally fast website performance to your users across the globe.

While using a CDN you need to serve the images from a different URL, which is your CDN URL.

For example:

Image URL without CDN: https://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

Image URL with CDN: https://static-ea7a.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/an-image.png

There are various CDN provider available, but I use KeyCDN and Cloudflare. Cloudflare serves the contents with 150+ data centers while KeyCDN has 34 data centers. Cloudflare is easy to combine with other CDN provider increasing the data centers for more faster content delivery.

Since Cloudflare doesn’t set CDN URL for the images, hence you can serve images from KeyCDN. It’s very easy to set up. Just create an account on KeyCDN, verify your email address and you will be ready to launch.

Create a custom new zone URL where you want to pull content from.

Go to “zone” from KeyCDN dashboard and fill up the form.

Saving this Zone will lead to a new window where you can see the newly created Zone’s status, and access the CDN URL as well.

Install CDN enabler plugin (light weight) by developed KeyCDN and use the CDN URL that you have created few moments ago.

Clear your website cache and Cloudflare cache (if you use Cloudflare) and re-check your website address in GTmetrix. The “Serve Images From CDN” warning should disappear upon using this technique.

---

#6. Leverage browser caching

We can set a default expiry time for our website resources like CSS, images, java scripts, etc under which if a person visits your website again using the same browser, the browser doesn’t have to download that resource from the server. This lead to a quick page load.

See this image below.

On WordPress, the easiest way to leverage browser caching is editing your .htaccess file and add the following code into it.

Caution: Only add this code. Don’t make any other changes inside the .htaccess file.

#Customize expires cache start - adjust the period according to your needs
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
  FileETag MTime Size
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain text/html text/xml text/css application/xml application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/javascript application/x-javascript
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresByType text/html "access 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
  ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"  
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
  ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
#Expires cache end

Inside this code, we have mentioned jpg, jpeg, png, and gif and set their expiry time to 1 year. This makes certain that the media files which needs the most time to download are stored on the visitors’ computer, and won’t be needed to download again until the next year.

Hint: Sometimes, changes in WordPress for browser caching doesn’t get detected immediately after changing the .htaccess file. But it does work well.

---

#7. Minimize Image URL Redirect

URL redirection increases waiting time to load a resource. Redirecting a website to [https] URL from it’s original [http] URL takes extra time to load a page and can show a minimize redirection warning.

GTmetrix recommends using [https] URL to prevent content redirection.

Redirection in WordPress website can be minimized or completely stop by updating the website URLs to [https] version with the help of Better Search Replace plugin.

Alternatively, you can change the site URL inside WordPress general settings. (In case you do not serve images from CDN or other hosts)

---

#8. Combine Images Using CSS Sprite

Website theme uses small icons to represent a beautiful design. Even we use icons in our pages, mostly on the homepage. In my website, there are 4 icons on the home page. But they are actually 1 image. You can do that using CSS sprite. Combining 4 images into 1 image decrease the total number of browser request and speed up page loading time as well.

Creating CSS sprite is a little bit technical or you can use a CSS sprite generator.

Hint: Don’t use CSS sprite for your important images such as featured image, images that describe your posts. Because combining these images will lead to lost of alt tags for each of them. Alt tags are a powerful SEO factor.

---

#9. Bonus Tips To Optimize WordPress Images

Above mentioned techniques will help you to optimize WordPress images. However, these are not everything about image optimization. There are more other tricks which you can use to optimize website images as well. I will mention a few ways you can apply with the image.

#9.1 Apply Lazy Load

Halt the image loading process while the other part such as layouts, fonts, CSS are loading. It will not affect the visitor’s experience because as soon as the image comes inside the display it will load separately.

I use Autoptimize caching plugin and there is an option to unable image lazy load. If you use another plugin, the lazy load should be available there as well. Else, use the lazy load plugin.

#9.2 Remove EXIF data

EXIF data contains the information such as image shutter speed, image ISO, focal length, model of the camera, image date, and much more. These information doesn’t need while using that image on your website. So consider removing them.

Popular WordPress image optimization plugins like Imagify, Smush, ShortPixel have an option to keep EXIF data. Make sure you uncheck that.

#9.3 Use Correct Image Format

I prefer to use PNG, JPEG and WebP format for my website. PNG is uncompressed version so you should use PNG with small images with less color effect. JPEG is compressed and can be used for colorful images. JPEG is lower in size and hence lose its quality. See this Illustration below by Labnol or this article comparing RAW vs JPEG.

WebP is a new image format employing both lossless and lossy compression developed by Google and useful for the website as it provides image quality with less image size.

#9.4 Use Proper Image Name And Alt Tag

Search engine checks both name and alt tag of an image. So naming your image file before uploading and setting alt tag after uploading are an important task.

Avoid keyword stuffing in image name & alt tag. Just describe the image naturally.

<img src="https://www.rankwp.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/how-to-install-wordpress" alt="how-to-install-wordpress" width="577" height="247" />

To find images with missing alt tags you can use Image Alt Tag Checker and locate the image to add a proper alt tag.

#9.5 Enable Hotlink Protection

Hotlink protection prevents other people from copying and pasting your image on their own websites. Using your images on their website can consume your hosting bandwidth resources.

Caution: Hotlink protection can prevent featured image from appearing on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter.

---

Final Words: As long as the image remains one of the most important parts of an article optimization is necessary. I have added some key ways to optimize WordPress images in this article. However, there are more roads which you can follow to speed up the page performance.

Make sure to optimize your website performance since this is a key factor of SEO these days. Have any thoughts regarding this article! Mention it below in the comment section.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are getting closer. It is already a record year for ecommerce with so many people turning to ecommerce to provide for them during the pandemic.

After building a site, you need to analyze the performance and speed. The full insight of the site will give you a performance report so that you can monitor it easily.

There may be certain times when you need to migrate your online business in terms of hosting and domain name. There may be a couple of reasons such as:

1. At some point, you may realize that the current domain is not the right domain for your website.
2. You could be facing some issues with your branding.
3. Or you could just want to give yourself a fresh start.

In such situations, most people find it difficult to migrate their website to a new host or using the same host while assigning a new domain name to it. Of course, it is a little bit complex task. Moreover, migrating your domain name could wipe out all the hard work you have done for your site’s SEO.

Most of the independent webmasters or businesses use WordPress nowadays. It’s efficient, easy and powerful as well. So in this article, I will go through step by step tutorial “how you can migrate your domain name easily”.

In the meantime, we have another crucial point to remember that we do not want to lose our search engine rankings + traffic while performing a migration.

So, before proceeding to the tutorial part let me tell you a few things that you should expect and follow during this migration process.

• Do not change your URL structure “permalink” so frequently. Changing your site URL structure will have a bad impact on your SEO since once you change the address people will no longer find the page from a search engine or any backlink.

• You should expect a drop in your current traffic for the first few days or maybe a week. The reason is that all your new posts and pages will be crawled under a separate name which will initially have a low domain authority of course.
• Make sure you do not delete the previous domain and keep the website live on that domain too. 

These are some points that you should take care of while migrating your domain name.

Now I am assuming that you have already bought a new domain name and assigned it with hosting nameserver.

From here you will start the process of migration so keep tracking your progress step by step.

#1. Backup Your Website’s Content

Backing up your site contents is very necessary. It will be beneficial for you because while migrating the domain name of your site if anything goes wrong you can immediately fix it by replacing with the backup files.

There are several ways to backup. You can use the hosting default quick site backup option or you can use a WordPress plugin like “all in one migration” or “updraft”.

I prefer to back up the “public_html” folder directly from the host and the database of the website as well. You can apply any method whichever option looks sweet to you. All it matters to have a backup of the site to prevent any data loss during the domain migration process.

* * Depending on the hosting these options may appear different but the work is the same.

#2. Upload the backup contents into your new hosting

Once you have completed the downloading of the backup file, now install WordPress in the new hosting. After installing WordPress open the file manager of new hosting. You can use the default file manager or any FTP client.

Now find the “wp-content” folder from the backup file > extract it and make a separate ZIP file.

Go ahead and upload that zip file into your new site. During the uploading process you will get a notification for replacing the existing contents. Click “replace” and your site content will be uploaded into the new site in a couple of minutes.

In the next step, you will need to upload your previous database into the new one simply by following the “import” technique. Read this guide to know how to do it.

Once your database is updated you can access your WordPress dashboard on the new address once you perform the later part of this tutorial.

#3. Update your site’s new address

Now it’s time to update your website address. First, go to Settings >> General.

Place your new domain URL in both the “WordPress address” and “Site Address”.

** To connect your host with the domain name you should make sure that you have updated the name servers.

Once you have changed the URL in general settings click on “save”, you may be required to wait ⅔ hours so for domain name connection. After ⅔ hours your domain nameserver change will propagate worldwide.

#4. Update the links in the website \

Once you have updated the new domain name in your WordPress, the next step is to update all kinds of internal links that are pointing to the older domain name. 

You need to replace all the links in CSS, Javascript, or maybe the links of your content. It can be a difficult task to do manually so you can take the help of a reliable WordPress plugin or WordPress command line.

One such plugin is Better Search and Replace. To use this plugin first install it from the WordPress repository.

1. Install Better Search and Replace plugin.
2. Go to tools > better search and replace settings
3. Type your old site URL address in “search for the box”.
4. Type your new site URL in the “Replace with” box.
   
   

   

5. Select all kinds of tables.
6. Check Replace GUIDs
7. Check Run as a dry run.
8. Run search/replace.

#5. Applying 301 redirects to the links

After updating the internal links of your site, the next step is the most important step in migrating your WordPress website’s domain name. Adding the 301 redirect means directing the traffic from your previous domain name to your new domain name.

** And this is the reason why you should not delete the old website while setting up the new website.

If you skip this step, you will ultimately lose all the backlinks linked with your website. This will obviously put a negative impact on the SEO of your website. Furthermore, if the visitors will click on the previous links on that website, it will drive them to nothing hence eventually generating broken links, generating 404 pages.

You should know that Google takes 404 Errors very seriously. If they encounter too many 404 errors – Google will penalize your rankings.

There are multiple ways to redirect your site links, you can use plugins or do it manually but doing so will be very painful. You can add 301 redirect links by adding them at the server level via htaccess too.

Another great and easy way to add 301 redirect links is with the help of Cloudflare. Follow the step in the image. 

Inside Cloudflare, create a “Page Rule” where each URL that matches “yourolddomain.com” is 301-redirected to “yournewdomain.com”.

#6. Update Your Website in Google Webmasters Tools

Once you are done with the redirection it’s time to inform Google that you are migrating to a new website. You can do this using the webmaster tool or currently known as the search console. You will need to send a request to Google regarding the change in the address of your previous domain. This way, Google will recognize that you have migrated to a new domain and will give you some SEO benefits.

** I am assuming your previous site as a verified property of the search console. If you have not verified yet make sure you do it.

First of all, you will need to verify your new website as a property. Once your site is verified go to change of address tool and select your previous website.

Once you have selected, in the next step you will need to pick your new site from the drop-down menu and then scan whether all the 301 redirections are working properly or not.

After that, the tool will confirm both the sites as verified and allow you to submit your new domain as a replacement to the old domain.

While doing so, if you use Google Analytics for tracking your site traffic then you should also create a new property in the analytics tool and connect the new domain with analytics.

#7. Do not forget to submit the sitemap

After submitting your domain change request, you will need to submit your new domain’s sitemap. Once the domain is verified in the webmaster tool you can easily submit your sitemap.

Having a sitemap will provide you additional SEO benefits. You want to keep updating the sitemap of your site too. A sitemap will support your website to get crawled quicker.

After the change of your domain name, it’s time to pay attention to minor details. Update the primary information present in all the plugins associated with your site. And, make sure to track the number of pages with 404 errors and fix them as soon as possible.

Final thoughts:

Following the above-mentioned steps, you can effortlessly migrate the domain name of your website without hurting the SEO of your site. Although we would recommend not changing the domain name unless it’s utterly essential.

Cheers…

Over the past 10 years I have purchased hundreds of sites. Often these are smaller sites sometimes with some problems that people are looking to sell quickly. For years I have ranked #1 for sell your website fast and have seen lots of interesting deals come across my plate. 

Some of the deals have turned out to be amazing while others have been complete failures.

When I recently did an analysis on all the purchases that failed I could group them into 3 categories. 

These are now my 3 keys when purchasing sites…

ONE – Simple + Believable Traffic and Monetization Data

This one has always been hard. Often a site that can’t be sold somewhere else will come to me and will have some odd way of monetizing. It could be a unique affiliate arrangement, hard to track earnings, traffic tracked with something other than GoogleAnalytics, weird Google Analytics setup etc. 

This rule is also a catch-all for any time that the numbers are confusing or don’t check out. 

When a site has a clean monetization method that I am familiar with (adsense & amazon are ideal) and traffic sources that can be verified (organic traffic with Google analytics) it makes the purchase much simpler/faster. 

Case Study: Custom Affiliate Arrangement Cancelled In The First Week

I purchased a site in the tech space that had tutorials that were about 2 years old. A couple of those tutorials were ranking very well and the site was generating about $25/day from one relationship for lead generation. It was also making some earnings from adsense but the revenue per user from the lead generation arrangement was 10x better than adsense. 

Lots of things checked out…

• the site had been around for a couple years
• traffic was growing steadily
• the quality of the content was the best for what it was ranking for

But… 1 week after I purchased it I received an email from the business contact for the lead generation company and was informed they no longer saw value in the relationship and were terminating it. I don’t believe any funny business occurred with collusion between the seller and the lead generation company but it certainly hurt! I was able to refocus the site on adsense and bring up the earnings to about 25% of what they were when I purchased the site. 

Overall it was an unfortunate event and one of a few where I purchased a site with a monetization strategy I was not very familiar with and the site struggled.   

TWO – Not Declining and with Decent History

Lots of sites that are declining have sellers that are eager to sell. In terms of the multiple paid to purchase the website they can often look like incredible deals.

So many sites come to me that are declining I have even created a strategy for trying to revive them… Dead Cat Strategy – How to turn around a declining site.

However, what I have often seen is that the inertia of a declining site takes more energy to turn around than it is worth. If the deal is too good to pass up then great but many times I have been lured in from the “cheap” multiple to buy a declining site and been overconfident in the time/energy I will dedicate to turning it around. 

Case Study: First Larger Purchase

Early on around 2010 I put in a lot of effort and the most money I had to date to purchase a site. The site was declining but I had grown a site in that niche already and had unique affiliate arrangements which gained me more per commission than the seller was receiving. I thought despite the fact it was declining I would be able to turn it around and instantly give it a lift with improved monetization. 

The result was that despite way too much effort to turn it around the site continued to slide. The lift in earnings I was able to achieve was great but all of that lift was quickly eaten up by the continued decline.

I certainly overpaid but the bigger failure in this case was sticking with the site for too long. This and others like it helped me evolve my dead cat strategy… 

• buy cheap
• give it a kick (quick SEO audit and add more content/links)
• if it jumps nurse it back to health and if it stays on the decline let it go

THREE – Current Operator Not Doing Unique Activities

This one is my favourite because it often brings me in contact with some “crazy” entrepreneurs! 

I have had a couple experiences where I purchased a site where the deal came to me because they had been turned away from brokers due to being volatile/rude/crazy! Some of these purchases have been great but I often learn the same lesson over and over. 

That lesson is that if the founder is still heavily involved in the business they are often doing something that is generating value you can’t simply plug in an SOP to handle. 

Case Study: Welcome to Crazy Town!

There was an ecommerce site generating 20k/month in revenue and everything about the deal was great!

• Great price to buy the site as she was too crazy for brokers who she previously spoke with to handle or put her on a call with a buyer
• Lots of organic traffic verified with significant content marketing growth opportunities
• Healthy margins for dropshipping and long history with the wholesaler (10years)
• Sites conversion rates could do with an easy improvement with images/redesign

There was one big variable… the founder. She was working tons of hours with it as her full time job and most of the activities I thought were completely inefficient. She was spending her day doing what seemed like inefficient tasks such as directory submission, social bookmarking, misc conferences, calling every customer (valuable but inefficient), TONS and TONS of “research” and only a little content creation.

But what I didn’t fully appreciate was how much that relentless energy and obsessive focus put into the business yielded sales. 

We improved a lot of things easily… improved the rankings, improved the site and the conversion rate for organic traffic, email automation, abandoned cart and other site tweaks. All these changes improved the metric we were trying to but overall… sales dropped by 40%!! 

How…To a significant extent I didn’t realize how much she was acting as a sales person talking to everyone she could about the site/product wherever she went… grocery store, post office etc. 

For me who likes to see all activities in the business fit neatly into an SOP I need to be on the lookout for the founder doing things that don’t scale and can’t be efficiently replaced.

Overall the purchase of this business was still a great one as even though revenue declined it was operated more efficiently and profits went up but… I had hoped for much more.

What Are Your Hard Earned Website Purchase Due Diligence Rules?

If you have been busy purchasing sites have you discovered any “rules” you follow? If so please share in the comments.