How can a single homepage image be doing damage to your ecommerce store rankings?
Well, grab a ☕️ and buckle in, it’s time to see a real example…
The Impact of Big Images Above the Fold on an Ecommerce Home Page
With a decade of helping ecommerce store owners improve their SEO, I can always find something to improve on a website.
Recently, I found an example where improving a SINGLE element of a page could make a significant positive difference in organic traffic and sales.
Stewarts of Trent Bridge have a fabulous offer, and their coffee has just won a 2024 Great Taste Award, again!
So how could they get it into more people’s baskets?
Remarkably, making changes to the main image above the fold on their homepage could unlock more organic traffic and sales. Here’s three ways it could work harder for them:
#1: Reduce the Size
The image in question, see below, is gigantic in terms of memory.
At 20MB, it is one of the largest I’ve ever come across and so big that it visibly slows down the page loading time. This makes for a poor user experience, which is why Google downgrades slow sites.
The mission here is to make it a lower-memory format and there are a number of ways to do it:
- Save it as a smaller image, e.g. if it only needs to be 1000 pixels wide, don’t save it as 25,000 pixels wide.
- Open a preview on your computer and take a screengrab (which is what I did for the image above).
- Use an image shrinking site like Tiny JPG (although this image was too large to upload there!).
- Install a plugin like ShortPixel on your website which will automatically optimise images as you upload them.
There are no good excuses for slowing down your customer journey with bloated images.
#2: Get Your Priorities Right!
It’s surprising how much an ecommerce store’s success relies on getting the brand consistent.
When potential customers land on your home page (or any other page, for that matter) they don’t want to be jarred by seeing something they weren’t expecting or not seeing the thing that they were.
With the huge caveat that I don’t work for or with Stewarts, so have no working knowledge of their strategy, look again at the image above. What’s it advertising above the fold on their homepage?
Barista Courses and Workshops.
That may be their business priority, but their about page talks of their “mission to make quality coffee the norm” and so maybe you’d expect the average visitor to be there to buy coffee.
AHRefs says that their top pages are actually coffee products, e.g. grinders and presses, so maybe that’s what their homepage should feature.
Anyway, you get the point.
Whatever the focus of your business is, which can change by brand, season, and strategy, that’s what should be above the fold.
#3: Text in Images is NOT Text
You might not realise that Google is not very good at reading images.
We look at that main banner and can see that it says “Barista Courses…” and has sections like “Espresso Foundations” but Google can’t because it’s an image with NO text.
The text we can see is baked into the image, not written over the top of it. And while Google AI can read text in images, the cost of doing so for a crawl of the World Wide Web makes it prohibitive.
In other words, assume that Google can’t read any text that isn’t… well, text.
SEOs have a workaround for that, called an alt tag. We use it to tell Google what the content of an image is.
But this mega-banner does not even have that!
Video Guide to Homepage Problems
Watch my video below as I take you through the mistakes in real time.
Summary
Who’d have thought that one image can have such a negative impact on your organic rankings?
But the reality is that Google can see a huge, slow image at the top of Stewarts’ home page but has no idea what it’s about, which is why I’ve reached out to Stewarts to let them know.
You’re super busy running your business and rightly don’t spend loads of time lost in the details of SEO. But please check whether you’re making any of these mistakes.
If you haven’t got the time to do that, feel free to ask me to help using the form below.