When setting up an online store on Shopify, you'd be forgiven for thinking image sizes weren't important. Image sizing and quality are crucial for making sales in your ecommerce store. Unlike physical stores, where a customer can pick up a product, feel it, and see the size immediately, ecommerce stores rely solely on their images to sell their products. The customer has to get an idea of the product size and quality from a few photos.
This article will explain why image optimization is essential for your Shopify store and discuss all the different image types and formats you'll need to succeed. We'll also confirm the most ideal Shopify image sizes.
If you're puzzled about where to begin when selecting the best Shopify image sizes, you're in luck. The ecommerce platform does have a set of requirements it recommends for sizing, so that's an excellent place to start.
When uploading a Shopify image, the maximum file size is set at 20MB, so you can't upload anything higher. The sizing can go up to 4472 x 4472 pixels. That is the maximum image size, so the image should be less than that, and depending on what you're using it for, you might want it to be smaller. The minimum size allowed is 800 x 800 pixels – you'll notice that Shopify prefers square images. Anything outside these specifications could affect your product images' quality and zoom capabilities.
You might not think image size affects much when it comes to the user experience of your store, but you'd be wrong. The Shopify image size can affect many aspects of a customer coming to your site. A study carried out among ecommerce shoppers showed that 83% of shoppers said product image was the most influential thing in deciding to buy a product. So having the right image size and type of image is crucial to making sales on ecommerce platforms.
There are many reasons image optimization is crucial for your brand on Shopify. Firstly, the image size affects how a customer sees your product or brand and perceives its quality. If you went onto a website and the images were too small, so you couldn't see the product, you'd most likely go to a competitor's website with better product photos and purchase from them.
Having a fast site loading speed on desktop or mobile is crucial to customer conversion rates. One in four online shoppers said they would leave a website if it took more than four seconds to load up a page. One of the classic reasons for slow page speed is large image file sizes and pictures that are too big. If your images are big and take a long time to load, it could be costing you customers.
Several images will need to load on almost every web page on your site. It's not just product images. You'll also have logo or brand images, a banner, and possibly a video. It depends on how many you want to put on your website. These need to load quickly, at no inconvenience to the customer, to retain sales.
The ideal image is high quality enough that your customer can see the product quality but not too big to affect the web page's time to load. The same goes for the size. Following the Shopify guidelines means you can't go wrong.
When selling a product, you need a specific size and image quality that allows the customer to zoom in on the product and show off the details. If you're selling handbags, giving the option to zoom in means consumers can view the clasp or the texture of the material. It also shows the quality of the item. Having the wrong Shopify image size could mean that the image distorts or doesn't load when zooming.
Having the correct Shopify image sizes means a better overall experience for the customer. If you went onto a website and all the images were random sizes, it would put you off browsing that page. It wouldn't be visually appealing. Your pictures are what's selling your products, and drawing customers into your store, so you want them to hit all the right notes.
You want to optimize your images for both desktop and mobile users. When mobile users are browsing the internet, there's nothing more frustrating than a website only modeled for desktop users. 79% of smartphone users have used their devices to buy something online in the last six months. That's a lot of revenue you could be losing if your Shopify images aren't suited to mobile devices.
While a lot of SEO comes from the written content on your website, the algorithm considers page load times too. So if your Shopify images load quickly, you'll rank higher on search engines as the algorithms will understand you're meeting the load time standards.
It's a small thing, but anything that gets your website ranking higher in search engines means more web traffic to your store, more customer conversion, and more sales.
While every store has its unique branding and images, you'll notice as you browse ecommerce stores that there is a Shopify image best practice, like an unwritten code that stores follow. Because these methods have been tried and tested, you see what works best for customer attraction and conversion. Best practices will change from industry to industry, but on Shopify, images tend to follow a rough style guide.
Consistent branding is vital to the success of your Shopify store. This stretches across your banners, collections, and product images. You want to follow the same pattern with all your product images, so when the customer browses your catalog, they are reassured they will see the same image type and the product advertised in the same way.
The same concept applies to your logo and banners. Your online store would appear confused if there was a different logo or color scheme on every web page, which would turn customers off. A consistent brand is a stable brand, and that's the image you want your customers to have of your store—one where they know what to expect.
This could be using the same style of thumbnails for your products, so when all your products are lined up in an image grid on your site, customers can easily see them beside each other. It gives your catalog a uniform look with the primary product images all looking the same.
Whenever you put content on your site, you should ensure it follows the same style, coloring, and branding that you've used in the past. The only time this changes is if you've decided to do a brand overhaul.
When you're setting up your Shopify store, one of the crucial things to consider is the style of your branding and content. Is your logo going to be vibrant and bold? Or will you go for a softer approach? Do you want your content to be minimalist? These are all questions you'll think about when setting up Shopify themes and adding your products.
All your content should follow the same style you've used consistently throughout and show customers your brand's personality and style.
In a minor paradox to the above statement, you also want some variety across your content. That doesn't mean using different image sizes and making things look untidy; it just means using a variety of image styles to sell your products and brand. So when a customer clicks from your catalog into the product, they should see slideshow images offering them different viewpoints of the product.
This could be a product in use image and a product only image, and even a video. For example, if you're selling a product that looks different from the back, you could provide pictures that show different angles, like in apparel.
As images are the primary way a customer sees the product on your ecommerce store, the more images you offer, the more they know about the product. This allows them to understand better if it's a suitable item. The customer also has a better expectation of what they'll receive, and they're less likely to return it.
While product images are imperative for customers buying from your online store, there are many image types on Shopify you'll use. Each one has a different function to convert people into paying customers for your ecommerce store.
One of the primary Shopify images you'll use is product images. These are the images that sell the specific product to the customer. High quality, user-friendly product images are vital to sales and profits for your store. Shopify allows you to upload up to 250 images per product, but using too many could be confusing. There are two types of product images you'll use.
A product only image will show only the product and nothing else. They usually come on a white or neutral background and can zoom in to view material type and texture. The product photo should be of high quality, and generally, you want all product only images to be the same. The product should be in the center of a neutral background.
You can also use the product only images to show the size and spec of the item by offering measurements alongside it so the customer knows how big it is.
Product in use images is where you can have a little fun as a brand. This allows you to show online customers how people can use your products. With apparel, you usually see a model wearing the clothing, often from different angles, with the option to zoom in so people can view how the item looks when it's worn. When advertising a bag, this could include showing how much the bag can carry or how customers would wear it.
Shopify product image sizes range from 4472 x 4472 pixels to 800 x 800. However, for square product images, they recommend 2048 x 2048 pixels. This size will maintain excellent page loading speed while allowing the option to zoom in on product images without losing the quality, and they work well on both desktop and mobile screens.
Shopify collections allow you to bundle products into groups which means the customer can browse an entire collection of products. Shopify recommends setting up collections for color, type, season, style, and gender. Collection images look better when they're all square images, as they sit neatly together in a grid.
Ultimately, the collections you choose will be the ones that suit your brand. If you're a store that sells different types of items, you could bundle these together. So when customers are looking for a specific brand, they can view all the products they sell.
For Shopify collection images, Shopify recommends 1024 x 1024 pixels. All photos should be consistent as the customer is browsing many products at once. An image of a different size or style can stick out like a sore thumb. Ensuring your collection images are consistent is key to selling items via the collections on your Shopify store.
As collection pages are loading multiple images at once, ensuring a smaller file size is crucial for keeping the web page loading quickly enough for consumers.
Slideshow images can advertise your products on different web pages of your online store in a slideshow that runs along the top of the screen. These slideshow images should follow your brand's style and theme and can be pretty technical due to sizing. Be careful to avoid awkwardly cropping the product to fit the slideshow image size requirements.
With slideshow images, you're likely to have these running in a thin banner along the top or bottom of the page on your Shopify store. Shopify's guideline for slideshow image sizes is 1600 x 500 pixels, reflecting that you'll need a wide but short image. It can be tricky to find an image size that means you're showing off your products in a visually appealing way while restricting to the Shopify slideshow image size. But you could achieve this by showing multiple products in one image or having some text alongside the product image.
Every brand needs a logo, and an ecommerce store is no different. It should feature on every page of your online store. Your logo will be unique to your business and should reflect your brand's personality and style. You want it to be simple but memorable.
Shopify logo image sizes can be 450 x 250 pixels, but that doesn't mean you have to go for that. An ideal Shopify logo size is 200 x 200 pixels. As your logo will feature on almost every page on the website, you want the image and file size to be small, so it loads quickly.
A featured blog image will make your Shopify blog look professional and help with SEO optimization. These images should be high resolution, as they will be large, and you want them to work on desktop and mobile screens.
Blog image sizes can be larger as they need to be featured along the back of the entire page. Shopify recommends 1800 x 1000 pixels. They can be bigger file sizes, but Shopify doesn't allow image file sizes higher than 20MB. You don't want to use file formats that are too high because the bigger the file, the longer the page load time.
You can use several different file formats for Shopify images, and each has its unique features. When using multiple image formats, you'll offer variety for your customers, but remember to keep the style consistent in all your content.
JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) files are the most popular file formats for uploading images to the web. Shopify also recommends the image format because it has a smaller file size but still renders high-resolution images perfect for zooming capabilities. You can still use various vibrant colors with JPGs, meaning you can grab customers' attention and still have fast load times.
The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) file format is also popular on the ecommerce platform. These files compress easily, which means you can have a small file size but a high-resolution image that looks excellent. PNG files can also have transparent images, so you'll be able to upload a product image with a transparent background.
A GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) differs from JPG and PNG formats as it is a moving image. It's a bitmap (BMP) image that enables you to animate images. We see this commonly on the internet, with TV shows and movies getting small GIFs created for scenes. Using a GIF on your ecommerce store could make your products stand out from the competition.
Image optimization is vital to the success of your Shopify store. You can use many image types and file formats across your ecommerce store, and you must use them correctly to get high customer conversion. Customers are more likely to buy from an online store with fast web page speeds, and ensuring consistency in branding and style is key to customer satisfaction. The best Shopify image sizes are different for the various types of images on the ecommerce platform.
