Just like choosing different fonts or colours for you website, there are different image formats that offer different advantages. Whether you are creating an e-commerce site, an artist portfolio, or a website for institutions or organizations, these different image formats can make your products stand out, or your photographs and portraits sharp and clear.

“So how do I know when to use each format?” you might be wondering. This simple guide gives you the advantages of the three most used formats (JPEG, GIF and PNG) and their uses.

Great tools to help with SEO.

There are some excellent seo plugins for Wordpress. We typically use Rankmath or Yoast. When you’re editing a page in Wordpress they give each page a score provide feedback about how to improve the search engine optimization  of the page.If you want an independent tool for digging deeply into your sites seo, including keyword research, seo audits, competitor analysis and more, check out
SEM Rush.

 

Looking for excellent Wordpress hosting? Check out Kinsta. Easy to use, fast, and secure.

2. Use a security plugin

Wordpress security plugins can do a lot to protect your site: from blocking multiple attempts to break into your website to scanning for modified files and folders. Most are free, some have a relatively inexpensive paid Pro option which can be worth it for greater peace of mind.

We use Wordfence on most sites ourselves, but there are other great security plugins out there like Sucuri and iThemes Security Pro.

JPG

JPEG or JPG

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format offers a 16 million colour palette which makes the JPEG format ideal for photographs, portraits, product images on e-commerce sites, or images that are very detailed. Because JPEG images are more detailed, they tend to have larger file sizes which could make them load slower on a website.

GIF

GIF

GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. This format offers a 256 colour palette and supports transparency. The limited colour palette makes GIFs ideal for drawings with solid colours and simple lines, logos, diagrams or graphics where transparency is needed. You can also create animated GIFs for ads or to provide information in a looping sequence.

Get Started Now With Shutterstockshutterstock ad
PNG

PNG

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. This format supports an even greater colour palette than GIFs and JPEGs, as well as support transparency and transparent backgrounds. Although the PNG format offers a greater colour range than JPEGs, file sizes are often smaller which makes the PNG format ideal for faster loading on webpages.