The assumption is that once you’ve gotten all your images, files, copy, etc. together, you’re ready to upload. But taking the time to optimize your content — especially your images — is an important step.
“Optimizing” is anything you do to make your website run more efficiently, improve user experience, and increase legibility for search engine robots and screen reading technology.
For actors, that’s mostly about your images. High-res images will look best, but if you upload them at their original size, you might be slowing down your website.
Taking the extra time to prep your images is important for a few reasons:
Renaming your images is another often-skipped step that you should take. While you won’t see it on your website, it means that when someone googles you, your images definitely come up.
Here’s how to prep your content for the web.
Taking the extra time to optimize your images can improve your website’s load time.
You want to make sure your image is as small as possible while still looking good on every screen size. When you receive high res images from your headshot photographer, they may be anywhere from 2MB to 18MB+.
Image size refers to the amount of storage space an image requires (like GB, MB, and KB). But the size of the image, measured in bytes, is impacted by the width and height of the image (the image dimensions) as well as the resolution (ppi).
Your mac will show you the image size, dimensions, and resolution in your finder window.
Ideally, web images are smaller than 500KB, but I use 1MB as my upper limit when it comes to banner or fullscreen images. For any image that’s going to span the full width of the browser, look for an image that’s 2000px wide. (Or wider, then you can resize it down.)
If you’re on a MacOS, you can resize images using Preview. When the image is open, go to Tools > Adjust Size. From here, you can resize based on pixel width — you can see the current size and estimate from there.