When your a business owner and you are new to the ecomm space. There are a few things that can help your store and your products to perform better.
- Optimising the size of the images you’re uploading
- Naming your product images correctly
- Informative Product Titles
1. Optimising the size of the images you’re uploading
No-one likes a slow loading online store, and video and image sizes are one of the big things that can slow it down. Did you know that even though Shopify displays your images in WEBP format – which is great and compression, it can still only do so much. Before you upload your images to your product or store, you need to ensure that the image has been optimised. Whats optimisation your ask? this term is thrown around in the website space a lot and while a web designer will know what that means, chances are that you as a business owner are staring blankly at the screen wondering WTF does that mean.
Well optimisation is defined as “the action of making the best or most effective use of a situation or resource.” in Website terms it means making the image size as small as it can be without loosing too much detail. So when you get your images off your phone, from suppliers or even photographers they could be any where in the size range from 500KB to 15MB. Most good photographers and suppliers will share web versions of the images – these are already optimised for you. YAY! But if you are the one that is taking the photos or your sourcing stock images or even using AI generated images, they will need some optimisation before using them on your store.
How to optimise?
You would generally use an app to do this. If you have Photoshop or Canva – you can tweak the settings so you are exporting your images to around the 200KB – 450KB in size. The rule of thumb is for JPG if you bring the quality down to around 60% then you should get a good amount of reduction of file size but not loose too much quality. You can do this on a bulk scale with Adobe Lightroom.
Don’t have any of those above? There is an online tool https://tinypng.com/ that allows you to upload files and it will convert it for you. The Free plan allows 20 images per session with a max file size of 5MB. The next tier up is Unlimited images per session and max file size of 75MB for $39USD a year.
2. Naming your product images correctly
Before you go and hastily upload all your optimised images, lets talk about the names of these files. Too many times I’ve seen images named Screenshot or IMG_1234. Keeping them like this is like downloading all of your photos to your computer and not being able to preview the images – how easy is it going to be to know which image is for what product? You don’t, this is how Googles Search works with your image file names. It will show those images as relevant to the searcher if the file name has a description. That’s not to say you need to make your file names super long and drawn out. It’s more about providing a few keywords on what the file shows.
For example if you are clothing store and you get stock from your supplier, they will generally put the SKU or product style name in the title, you need to make sure that you keep those in the title. There is so many online stores that stock the same products and keeping the Label Name/SKU/Product Style Name will make sure that if a customer is searching for that specifically there is a higher chance that it will be shown on that first page of results. So my formula when naming product files or any files that are going onto your website
Business Name – Product Name – SKU/STYLE – type of product
Don’t stress if your images are already uploaded but you need to update the names. Shopify allows you to adjust the name of the file once its been uploaded! helps all us forgetful mums and women out there.
3. Informative Product Titles
So now that we have optimised and renamed our product images we can add them to the product. Similar to the Product image names, your Product Title is also very important and should be short and descriptive. I see a lot of stores that have a lot of similar products, so i get it, it can be hard to come up with amazing product title for all of your products. When your thinking of your titles, think of how a customer might search for it, Like “Mid length dress in pink with florals”. If your product title has none of those things in it there is a high chance that your product won’t be shown in the search results, leaving your competitors to benefit from the sale.
If we change a product title from a generic one like “Women’s Shirt” to “White Linen Jersey Tank Top” we are adding in fabrics, style and what item of clothing it is. This informs the customer what it is with more detail and when they click on your search result there is a higher chance that they will go through with the purchase (this is called a warm lead in the digital space)
Bonus Tip – Shopify has built in AI to help you write your product titles and file names, give it a go if your short on inspiration and time
So there is 3 simple ways to improve your shopify store without hiring a designer or developer.