Can you imagine buying a T-shirt from an online store without seeing it? What if a seller on Amazon, for example, had no images at all for their products? Wouldn’t that affect how much you’d be willing to buy from them?
A well-curated image of a product directly increases the conversion rate of people buying that product. That’s why WooCommerce store managers need to invest in the imagery related to the products they want to sell.
Product images are one of the most effective tools in your sales pipeline. It’s not simply about making your website more attractive or optimizing slow product pages, it’s about selling more. That’s why in this article, we’ll dig deep into how to fix the most common image issues in your WooCommerce and provide you with quick solutions for them.
Are you ready? Let’s start!
What is the importance of WooCommerce product images?
Your product images play a crucial role in the success of your WooCommerce business. Here are some reasons why high-quality and optimized product images are important for your eCommerce website:
Visual appeal
Having high-quality and attractive product images on your WooCommerce site will engage your customers and will capture their attention. Great product images can create a positive first impression and make your products more appealing, which might increase your sales.
Product understanding and reduced returns
Images provide a clear visual representation of your products. They will help your customers understand what your products look like by clearly displaying your products’ features, dimensions, color variations, and other important details. This visual information is essential for your customers to make informed buying decisions and manage their expectations. This will allow you to minimize the risk of your customers receiving products that they won’t be happy with, thus, reducing the rate of your product returns and any associated costs.
Building trust and differentiation
High-quality product images will help you establish trust with your customers. When shoppers see clear, detailed, and professional images, they will feel more confident in your products’ quality and authenticity. Additionally, these images will help you stand out from the competition, increasing your customers’ trust in your brand and encouraging them to make a purchase.
SEO and discoverability
When you have optimized product images, it can significantly improve your store’s search engine visibility. Adjusting the image file names, alt tags, and descriptions with relevant keywords will go a long way in helping search engines understand your content better and help your images rank in image searches, increasing the chances of your content and products being discovered. This is a great way of driving more organic traffic to your site and increasing sales.
In order to start tweaking your product images to reap the benefits above, you’ll need to learn the types of WooCommerce images first.
Types of images in WooCommerce
Before jumping into solutions for your WooCommerce image issues, let’s identify the different image types available. WooCommerce comes with these three types of images that you can set up and take advantage of for your store:
Single product images
Single product images are the largest images on the individual product details page.
Catalog images
Catalog images are medium-sized images used in product loops (shop pages, product category pages, related products, up-sells, cross-sells, etc.).
Product thumbnails
Product thumbnails are the small images commonly used underneath or beside your product image, in your customer’s shopping carts, and in your widgets. These can be used to showcase different angles of a product, different color options available, and so on.
Common WooCommerce image issues
If you’re facing Image issues on your WooCommerce site, it’s going to cause both you and your customers a lot of frustration. Fixing these product image problems is a surefire way of improving your online business. First, let’s look at the following most common WooCommerce image problems:
Blurry product images
A blurry product image is not much better than a blank one. Not only does it give your customers little to no idea of what the product looks like, but it also affects how professional and trustworthy your eCommerce store appears to them.
“If you’re still experiencing issues with your images, you might need to re-upload them with the highest quality possible available. This step is critical to generating the different image types sizes on your store because they’ll be created based on this image resolution. This way, the blurry or pixelated issues won’t be there anymore.” –Nabeel Molham
Low-quality images
Your product images may appear pixelated and lack defined details after you upload them to your WooCommerce store, despite your images appearing to be of great quality before you upload. This problem can be extremely irritating and will have a negative impact on your eCommerce conversion rate.
Wrong image sizes
Another issue you may be facing is finding a discrepancy in the dimensions of your uploaded images compared to their original versions.
For example, your original image dimensions may be 400×400 pixels, but right after you upload them to your WooCommerce website, these dimensions automatically readjust to the wrong image size and ruin your store’s visuals.
Zoom, lightbox, and slider features not working properly
Some of the top-reported image issues have to do with product gallery features such as the image zoom (also referred to as “magnification”), lightbox, and slider. Their settings can be found by going to Appearance > Customize > Theme Options > WooCommerce Options from your WordPress dashboard.
The reason you might be encountering issues might be due to your online store’s theme being incompatible with these WooCommerce product image features.
“Finding out what’s causing you issues with images is a complex task, as we’d need to identify several things before actually fixing it. In most cases I’ve seen, it has to do with a plugin conflicting within your WooCommerce store or the theme itself, which might have some CSS that’s not properly configured.” -Nabeel Molham.
A step-by-step guide to fix your WooCommerce image issues
We’ve just discussed the most common problems that you may be struggling with on your WooCommerce store. Now, let’s see how to solve them using the following tutorial. Ideally, any major changes should be first carried out and tested on a staging environment rather than immediately on your live website.
1. Do a WooCommerce checkup
Firstly, make sure that your WordPress install and WooCommerce plugin are updated to the latest version. Updates often contain bug fixes, performance improvements, and compatibility enhancements that can address your image issues or other problems with your WordPress store.
Additionally, if you are using any visual editors, custom builders, or plugins, it is essential to ensure that these tools are also up to date.
2. Check your WordPress theme image requirements
When you’re using WordPress to develop your online store, it’s important to consider the compatibility of your theme with WooCommerce. The theme you select may have specific recommendations or limitations regarding the dimensions or resolution of the product images you will use.
“It’s really important to have your image sizes correctly configured in your settings, otherwise your product images could load improperly. You need to specify the width and height of each type of picture based on your theme specifications and, ultimately, on what looks better on your store. And when you do that, make sure to regenerate all your images to reflect your updates.” -Nabeel Molham
You need to check the image size requirements of your theme through your theme’s documentation, settings, or customization options. You can also do this by opening the product page of any of your products and using the inspect element developer tool in your web browser. For example, if you’re using Google Chrome, you can right-click on the product image and select “Inspect” from the menu. This will open the inspect element developer tool, which allows you to view the HTML and CSS code of the page. Within the tool, you’ll be able to see the dimensions of the product image.
Once you have identified the recommended image sizes for your products, you can compare them to the image sizes recommended by WooCommerce and see if the dimensions align with one another. By ensuring that your theme’s image size requirements align with WooCommerce’s specifications, you can minimize potential issues and ensure that your online store functions properly, providing a visually appealing and user-friendly experience for your customers.
3. Customize your WooCommerce image sizes
The default image sizes for product images may not always meet your specific requirements. To address this issue, you have the option to define custom image sizes for your WooCommerce website. Custom image sizes allow you to set dimensions that are more suitable for your website’s design or layout.
From your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Media. You will see several options related to image sizes. These options typically include thumbnail size, medium size, and large size images. These settings determine the dimensions at which WordPress generates and displays different types of images on your website. Set the image sizes according to the requirements of your theme to ensure that your images are being displayed correctly and optimized for your online store.
If you’re having trouble identifying the correct sizes of your images and adjusting them for your eCommerce website, it’s best to hire one of our WooCommerce developers to handle it for you.
4. Check your product image format
You need to consider the file format you choose for your product images. The two most commonly used image formats for WooCommerce are PNG and JPEG.
JPEG is generally recommended by experts for product pictures because it provides high quality while keeping the file size relatively small. This is particularly useful when you have images with many features and colors. JPEG compression algorithms are designed to minimize file size while maintaining acceptable image quality. So if you need to save space and still maintain good image quality, JPEG is a suitable choice.
On the other hand, PNG format is a great option when you need to use transparent backgrounds or images with opacity. It is commonly used for screenshots or images that don’t require a wide range of colors. PNG files support lossless compression, which means they can be compressed without sacrificing any image data. This makes them ideal for graphics with sharp edges, text, or transparency.
Another format that can help optimize your photos is WebP. It is an image format developed by Google that offers both lossless and lossy compression. WebP files can be significantly smaller than JPEG or PNG files while maintaining good image quality. However, not all browsers fully support WebP, so it may not always be recommended unless you are using a content delivery network (CDN) that can serve the WebP files specifically to compatible browsers.
5. Use third-party plugins to resize and optimize your images
A very handy approach to your WooCommerce image problems is to use plugins. Image plugins are designed to optimize and manage the images you use in your WooCommerce store. They offer various tools and features to ensure that your product images are properly resized, compressed, and displayed correctly on your eCommerce website.
Plugins like Smush and Imagify are widely used because they offer image compression and resizing features. They automatically optimize images on upload and can process existing images in bulk so you can effectively manage your WooCommerce product images, improving the overall user experience, performance, and visual appeal of your online shop.
Next steps for optimizing your WooCommerce image sizes
As we’ve explained in this article, in order to maximize the impact of your product images in your WooCommerce store, make sure to use high-resolution images and avoid using blurry or pixelated images by utilizing the practices we listed for you above. Additionally, ensure that your website’s design and layout are optimized to showcase product images effectively, providing an intuitive and seamless browsing experience for your customers.
If you don’t feel comfortable tackling your WooCommerce image issues by yourself or you’re busy dealing with other more pressing facets of your business, leave it to our Codeable WordPress experts. All you have to do is submit your task and one of our WooCommerce expert developers will take care of it for you.
This blog post features Nabeel Molham, a freelance professional with 10+ years of web development experience, with a love of WordPress since version 2.8 way back in 2009. He specializes in helping clients achieve more with WordPress than thought possible. His extensive client work includes custom themes, plugins, integrations, security, speed, and performance optimization.
