Image Optimization on Market

For those who may not know, one of the greatest strengths of Envato is that people find us through Google search.

Google announced way back in 2010 that site/page speed was a ranking factor and we have been working tirelessly since then to improve the performance and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) of Envato Market. While we can optimize things in our control the item pages are primarily controlled by our authors.

The ability to add HTML for item descriptions means that authors are able to supplement text with images. These images are managed and hosted by authors and not all are optimized to their full potential.

Moving forward we want to improve the page load-time of the item pages by reducing the file-size of author generated images without compromising on quality, and at the same time optimise the way we deliver these images to our customers.

Our goal is to responsibly serve images to our customers, not change how our authors build and market their item descriptions.

In the next few months we plan to run a trial on a subset of Envato Market item pages to analyze the performance benefits and cost effectiveness of automatically optimizing images.

Image optimization is the process of choosing the best format and settings for an image in order to reduce its file-size without reducing its quality. Then to ensure images download as quickly as possible, we will serve the most appropriate version for the customer’s device via a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which specializes in image delivery.

For item pages it will be an invisible change, but from an SEO and engineering perspective automatically optimizing images should have a real impact on page-load times and user experience.

While we strive to make this a fully automated process there are some edge cases which require authors to make changes. To allow time for authors to make the necessary changes we won’t start our trials until at least 4 weeks from today.

1. Limit Image Height

Please limit all images used in item previews (via upload form) and item descriptions (added via HTML field) to a max-height of 8000px.

The tool we plan to use has a hard limit of outputting images no taller than 8000px, this means images taller than 8000px will maintain their aspect ratio, but will be height-limited to 8000px. This will result in the width of the image being reduced so that the aspect ratio can be maintained.

2. Be aware of caching

Please be aware there may be potential caching delays up to 4 hours if an image is updated at the source but its URL does not change. This is due to the fact that without a filename/URL change, we won’t necessarily know if the image has changed and therefore the old one will likely be served until its cache expires.

FAQs

Q: What if I have already optimized my images?
Top job! We will be keeping a close eye on the generated images and tweaking the compression settings as required to ensure that we do not over-optimize images. Rest assured the original image will not be affected.

Q: What sort of performance savings can be expected?
Try out this great tool on your item pages to get an insight of the likely file-size savings.

Q: How do I know if my images are being optimized?
Looking at the HTML source they will be served from the imgix.net domain.

Q: Is there anything else I can do as an author to optimize my item pages for SEO?
We did a blog post on the topic a while back, which is full of great suggestions.

To reiterate, as part of this trial there will be no change to how our authors build and market their item descriptions, however as mentioned there are some edge cases which will require author input.

We’ll be actively monitoring this post for the next seven days answering questions related to our trial. Please remember our community guidelines when posting.

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What about Retina size images? On our Pearl theme: https://themeforest.net/item/pearl-true-multiniche-wordpress-theme/20432158 - the image length is more than 8000 px because of Retina.

I guess if it’s more then 8000 then it’s more than 8000.

Great update! But I can see there are many author’s profiles have dead images due to url changed

This is kinda funny. Here you are telling people about optimization of images. Your website templates violate Google Guidelines and But you have added a builder that puts in 60.000 EXTRA characters of inline code. This is a small novel. This code is loaded into every page from Visual Composer. Your website templates violate Google Guidelines because this code slows down the loading of your to templates to a crawl. Goggle hates that. So do consumers and they will not wait the 20 seconds for these pages to load ( not cached ). Businesses will lose big time. Whew - did Envato screw them. And me too. I bought 2 of these recent Visual Composer templates and they are terrible. I wasted several weeks trying to develop them.

I complained to Envato and they never even answered, so I write this today upon seeing your suggestions on how to optimize. Template authors said too bad. YOu got me right between the eyes! I spent $5K in time before I researched this issue. I found developers stating using your VC themes was one of their biggest regrets. I stopped working on it right there.

The previous templates Envato sold used to be good. Your website templates you sell today violate Google Guidelines. More importantly slow loading websites will KILL a business. You’ll lose up to 90% of your new traffic.

Envato failed to listen to qualified developers so I am re-iterating their complaints as a 20 year veteran of SEO and Web Design.

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