Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Sitespeed: Do images require width and height attributes?
-
Currently working on a sitespeed issue, and was wondering if not having width and height for images actually do cause a problem. We simply Photoshop the resolution we require for the image and add it to the page as is. I though this would actually speed it up, but I am getting from www.gtmetrix.com that we should have them.
What's your experience? Thanks!
-
Just came across a terrific resource that reminded me you'd asked about further reading, Ben.
Check out BrowserDiet for a huge collection of resources about tuning front-end performance of websites. (You'll see #6 talks about exactly your original question)
I can also recommend reading Steve Souder's two books - High Performance Websites and Even Faster Websites - both from O'Reilly. Souders is pretty much the leading specialist in this area. He's the creator of YSlow, one of the primary tools for measuring/analyzing site speed, and is now Head Performance Engineer at Google. His website is SteveSouders.com
That'll be more than enough to get you started. Lemme know if you're still hungry for more!
Paul
P.S. The report details from tests at webpagetest.org can also teach you a huge amount, and there's a forum there run by Patrick Meenan (who built webpagetest) which is just excellent. Patrick frequently answers questions personally.
-
you're welcome, hope your site will be speeding up a lot!!!
-
Yes, thank you. We size them all to what we want on the site so we are good there. Just got done doing it, and it did make a difference. Thanks guys!
-
as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.
An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.
-
Perfect-O! I completely get it now. Thanks Paul. You da man!
I thought it would be faster as in my mind it was more to read, but now that I understand the loading, I get it. Guess I need to start researching how a website loads. Have any resources I can read, to up my experience with this?
I've been in development but on an application side not website side.
-
The main reason PageSpeed and YSlow recommend including width and height for images is as much the perception of page speed as the actual load time, Ben.
When you include the image dimensions, the browser can draw out the "containers" that will hold the images, reserving the space for them while they download. The browser can then go on the paint the rest of the pages CSS and objects around those "containers" without having to go back and redraw the whole page once the images have downloaded and their sizes are then known.
This gives the user the illusion of a much faster, cleaner page load, and hence the impression of a faster website.
Does that make sense?
Paul
[Edited to add: You should still keep doing what you're doing to produce "size-as" images for your pages. You don't want to be resizing images with the html dimensions, just reporting in html the actual size of the image]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Image Search - Is there a way to influence the related icons at the top of the image search results?
Google recently added related icons at the top of the image search results page. Some of the icons may be unrelated to the search. Are there any best practices to influence what is positioned in the related image icons section? Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaredBroussard1 -
How important is the file extension in the URL for images?
I know that descriptive image file names are important for SEO. But how important is it to include .png, .jpg, .gif (or whatever file extension) in the url path? i.e. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever vs. https://example.com/images/golden-retriever.jpg Furthermore, since you can set the filename in the Content-Disposition response header, is there any need to include the descriptive filename in the URL path? Since I'm pulling most of our images from a database, it'd be much simpler to not care about simulating a filename, and just reference an image id in my templates. Example: 1. Browser requests GET /images/123456
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dsbud
2. Server responds with image setting both Content-Disposition, and Link (canonical) headers Content-Disposition: inline; filename="golden-retriever"
Link: <https: 123456="" example.com="" images="">; rel="canonical"</https:>1 -
Combining images with text as anchor text
Hello everyone, I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy. Here is an example (I'll keep it simple): Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories: Christmas Classical Traditional So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like: Christmas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
Classical
Traditional Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like: "christmas violin sheet music" "classical violin sheet music" "traditional violin sheet music" I would be tempted to make the above links as follows: Christmas violin sheet music
Classical violin sheet music
Traditional violin sheet music But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these: Christmas
Classical
Traditional That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs. My questions are: 1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint? 2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do? I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!1 -
Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?
Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making :  changed to 
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P0 -
Dilemma about "images" folder in robots.txt
Hi, Hope you're doing well. I am sure, you guys must be aware that Google has updated their webmaster technical guidelines saying that users should allow access to their css files and java-scripts file if it's possible. Used to be that Google would render the web pages only text based. Now it claims that it can read the css and java-scripts. According to their own terms, not allowing access to the css files can result in sub-optimal rankings. "Disallowing crawling of Javascript or CSS files in your site’s robots.txt directly harms how well our algorithms render and index your content and can result in suboptimal rankings."http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.htmlWe have allowed access to our CSS files. and Google bot, is seeing our webapges more like a normal user would do. (tested it in GWT)Anyhow, this is my dilemma. I am sure lot of other users might be facing the same situation. Like any other e commerce companies/websites.. we have lot of images. Used to be that our css files were inside our images folder, so I have allowed access to that. Here's the robots.txt --> http://www.modbargains.com/robots.txtRight now we are blocking images folder, as it is very huge, very heavy, and some of the images are very high res. The reason we are blocking that is because we feel that Google bot might spend almost all of its time trying to crawl that "images" folder only, that it might not have enough time to crawl other important pages. Not to mention, a very heavy server load on Google's and ours. we do have good high quality original pictures. We feel that we are losing potential rankings since we are blocking images. I was thinking to allow ONLY google-image bot, access to it. But I still feel that google might spend lot of time doing that. **I was wondering if Google makes a decision saying, hey let me spend 10 minutes for google image bot, and let me spend 20 minutes for google-mobile bot etc.. or something like that.. , or does it have separate "time spending" allocations for all of it's bot types. I want to unblock the images folder, for now only the google image bot, but at the same time, I fear that it might drastically hamper indexing of our important pages, as I mentioned before, because of having tons & tons of images, and Google spending enough time already just to crawl that folder.**Any advice? recommendations? suggestions? technical guidance? Plan of action? Pretty sure I answered my own question, but I need a confirmation from an Expert, if I am right, saying that allow only Google image access to my images folder. Sincerely,Shaleen Shah
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Modbargains1 -
Google Not Indexing XML Sitemap Images
Hi Mozzers, We are having an issue with our XML sitemap images not being indexed. The site has over 39,000 pages and 17,500 images submitted in GWT. If you take a look at the attached screenshot, 'GWT Images - Not Indexed', you can see that the majority of the pages are being indexed - but none of the images are. The first thing you should know about the images is that they are hosted on a content delivery network (CDN), rather than on the site itself. However, Google advice suggests hosting on a CDN is fine - see second screenshot, 'Google CDN Advice'. That advice says to either (i) ensure the hosting site is verified in GWT or (ii) submit in robots.txt. As we can't verify the hosting site in GWT, we had opted to submit via robots.txt. There are 3 sitemap indexes: 1) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml, 2) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/listings.xml and 3) http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/plants.xml. Each sitemap index is split up into often hundreds or thousands of smaller XML sitemaps. This is necessary due to the size of the site and how we have decided to pull URLs in. Essentially, if we did it another way, it may have involved some of the sitemaps being massive and thus taking upwards of a minute to load. To give you an idea of what is being submitted to Google in one of the sitemaps, please see view-source:http://www.greenplantswap.co.uk/sitemap/plant_genera/4/listings.xml?page=1. Originally, the images were SSL, so we decided to reverted to non-SSL URLs as that was an easy change. But over a week later, that seems to have had no impact. The image URLs are ugly... but should this prevent them from being indexed? The strange thing is that a very small number of images have been indexed - see http://goo.gl/P8GMn. I don't know if this is an anomaly or whether it suggests no issue with how the images have been set up - thus, there may be another issue. Sorry for the long message but I would be extremely grateful for any insight into this. I have tried to offer as much information as I can, however please do let me know if this is not enough. Thank you for taking the time to read and help. Regards, Mark Oz6HzKO rYD3ICZ
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edlondon0 -
Getting Pages Requiring Login Indexed
Somehow certain newspapers' webpages show up in the index but require login. My client has a whole section of the site that requires a login (registration is free), and we'd love to get that content indexed. The developer offered to remove the login requirement for specific user agents (eg Googlebot, et al.). I am afraid this might get us penalized. Any insight?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo0 -
Blocking Pages Via Robots, Can Images On Those Pages Be Included In Image Search
Hi! I have pages within my forum where visitors can upload photos. When they upload photos they provide a simple statement about the photo but no real information about the image,definitely not enough for the page to be deemed worthy of being indexed. The industry however is one that really leans on images and having the images in Google Image search is important to us. The url structure is like such: domain.com/community/photos/~username~/picture111111.aspx I wish to block the whole folder from Googlebot to prevent these low quality pages from being added to Google's main SERP results. This would be something like this: User-agent: googlebot Disallow: /community/photos/ Can I disallow Googlebot specifically rather than just using User-agent: * which would then allow googlebot-image to pick up the photos? I plan on configuring a way to add meaningful alt attributes and image names to assist in visibility, but the actual act of blocking the pages and getting the images picked up... Is this possible? Thanks! Leona
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HD_Leona0
