Understanding Squarespace image sizes is critical to building an efficient site that displays well on all devices quickly, as well as being helpful for SEO purposes. It also increases conversion rates!
As part of minimalist website design, keeping file sizes small is crucial to page loading speed. Squarespace optimizes images by shrinking their dimensions and file sizes, increasing speedy page loads.
Banner Image
Squarespace makes it simple and effective for you to optimize the size of your images for display on various screen sizes, but it’s important to know exactly what size they should be before uploading them to your site – this ensures they look great while loading quickly for your visitors.
Squarespace recommends images be between 1500-2500 pixels wide to ensure they will display well on all screen sizes without stretching or pixilating, and that Squarespace can reformat them for various screen sizes without compromising quality.
Small images should aim to keep their file size under 20 MB for optimal SEO (search engine optimization), and to prevent penalties from Google for page load speed.
Find an image’s dimensions by right-clicking or command-clicking it and choosing “Inspect element”. Alternatively, Chrome provides its own tool for this purpose.
A primary image on any page should be 2000px to 2500px wide, making it the largest image on your website and displayed at full resolution across devices. ALT text for primary images may also prove helpful for screen reader users and search engines when trying to understand what it depicts.
For larger product images, it is advisable to create two images: a main product image that measures at least 1500px wide and a thumbnail image 250px wide. The main product image will appear in the Product Block while its respective thumbnail will display on Product Pages when users hover over an item within a block. When creating thumbnail images for larger product listings, be sure they accurately represent what the actual product looks like without including watermarks or logos that could detract from its appearance.
Favicons are small icons that appear in the address bar of a website and can serve both as logos and brand identifiers. To create one, use a program supporting transparency or save your image with a transparent background as a.png file.
Banner Header
Squarespace provides guidelines for the dimensions and file sizes of header images used on your site. Following these best practices will ensure that images you add look great while loading quickly, helping your search engine rankings to rise as well as increasing traffic to your website.
If you want to use a larger image for your banner header, one of the templates available under Design tab of Image Blocks editor may help. These will allow you to crop to an ideal ratio before customizing settings such as brightness, contrast, saturation etc.
Squarespace recommends saving header images as.png or.jpg files. When saving RGB color mode images, CMYK formats used for print won’t render correctly on most web browsers; also save text-rich images as PNGs rather than Jpegs to avoid blurry text caused by compression of JPEG images.
As part of your image preparation efforts, another great practice should be ensuring they have appropriate names and alt texts. This can greatly improve accessibility for people who are blind or visually impaired – screen readers read aloud any text present within images to users who lack sight.
As for alt text, there are multiple options for creating it: using either the description field of Image Blocks editor, or typing your keyword directly into Alt Text field under Content tab of Image Blocks editor. Just keep in mind that using multiple keywords per image would constitute keyword stuffing which will hurt SEO rankings and could significantly lower their rank in SERPs.
Product Images
Squarespace makes formatting images for the web much simpler by automatically creating seven variants for each image uploaded, ensuring they can display beautifully on displays of all sizes via galleries, sliders and other media. But before uploading photos to Squarespace it is still important that they are optimized as the resizing process may reduce quality; this blog post offers suggestions for optimizing them prior to uploading them so as to ensure maximum quality upon uploading to Squarespace.
Keep your image file sizes as small as possible to speed up page load times for visitors to your website. One effective way of doing so is compressing them before uploading them – there are numerous free and paid software programs for both Windows and Mac computers available that offer this function – before saving in Squarespace folders bearing their original names.
Squarespace recommends that when uploading files to Squarespace, only images in jpg, png and gif formats should be used as these are web compatible file types. Other file formats such as bmp, tif, psd and tiff cannot be used due to being non-web friendly.
At all times, images should remain below 500KB in file size to minimize load times for pages and improve user experience and SEO. Larger files can adversely impact both of these factors.
Name your images correctly when uploading them to Squarespace; to do this, enter their description into the image metadata field when uploading. This information will then appear in search engine results when people search for that image; it’s also wise to add keywords related to each photo to increase search rankings for your website.
Gallery Images
Squarespace makes it simple and effortless to have a website that looks amazing across all devices, regardless of screen size or resolution. One way they help make this possible is by automatically scaling down any images uploaded before uploading. While images that are too large may still display correctly across devices and load quickly for visitors, for best results and performance follow Squarespace’s recommended guidelines as this ensures they look their best and perform as intended for all users.
Always bear in mind the aspect ratio of your image is also essential in creating thumbnails, banners and gallery images with equal proportions. To do this properly, when cropping images that differ in size you may need to spend some time altering their aspect ratio before uploading.
Squarespace recommends an ideal thumbnail image size of 200×200 pixels to ensure crisp and clear thumbnails that can be read easily when displayed in grid, carousel or stacked layouts.
Another tip for Squarespace thumbnails is to name them appropriately and include a keyword in their descriptions, which will help search engines discover your images faster and rank them higher in results. Furthermore, adding alt text for each thumbnail image allows search engines and visitors who use screen readers alike to understand them better.
Before using sourced images on your Squarespace website, it’s a wise practice to verify their rights before downloading them. Unfortunately, many people unwittingly grab pictures that they do not own and end up being sued by their owners; so it is advisable to rely on stock photo sites that offer commercial usage licenses instead of taking images from Google searches, social media posts etc.
