AÂ picture speaks a thousand words.
Images on your blog play a major role, and I have discussed this concept earlier.
Here’s a quick recap:
- Images make your post look more visually appealing.
- Posts with images get more social media shares than posts without an image.
- Images help in driving traffic from image search engines.
There are a few more reasons, but the above three are the most important.
Now, there’s one more important question:
Where should one host their blog images?
Today, I got an email from a reader who is hosting his images on Flickr and running a WordPress blog.
Here is the email thread:
Initially, I thought Jeffy was hosting his images on Flickr because he might be using some less-robust CMS for his website.
I was surprised when he mentioned WordPress, and when I asked why he was hosting his images on Flickr, his response was something that reminded me of my early blogging days:
Back in 2010, I used to think that it was a good idea to host images on another site. This way I would save hosting bandwidth & my blog would load faster. I also thought it would lower down the consecutive HTTP requests to my server.
Well, I was wrong.
In this guide, I will share everything that I have learned about hosting images for a blog.
If you are one of those bloggers who is hosting their images on another image hosting site like Imgur, Flickr, Dropbox, Photobucket, or any other, read this guide carefully.
Why You Should NOT Host Images On 3rd Party Sites:
When you are running a blog on your server (self-hosted WordPress, or any other platform), hosting images on another site is a bad idea.
You are missing out on the major benefit of images & you are putting your blog’s future at risk.
- Have you thought about what will happen if the 3rd party site decides to shut down?
- What will happen if they delete your account or image(s) for any arbitrary reason?
When you are hosting images on your own hosting server, you are safe from the above risks. More importantly, you own the images, and you get to reap the SEO benefits of having images.
For BlogSpot Bloggers:
BlogSpot bloggers have to worry less about hosting images, as your images are hosted on your linked Picasa account. You can continue doing the same without issue.
But my one suggestion is:
When you migrate your BlogSpot blog to WordPress, you should also import all images to your personal web-hosting account.
- You can learn more about the process here.
Now, let me give you some solutions to all potential problems that you may have with regards to hosting images on your own server.
Bandwidth & Storage Issues
As Jeffy pointed out, having enough bandwidth is a real fear among many bloggers. If you are hosted on a server with limited bandwidth, you should move your site to a hosting company that offers unlimited bandwidth & storage.
Bluehost and HostGator are my top recommendations.
But you can check out these articles for more ideas:
- Bluehost vs. HostGator vs. DreamHost [Web Hosting Comparison]
- SiteGround Hosting Review: A Thorough Look At Their Shared Hosting
- Best Managed WordPress Hosting Providers
Image Loading
If you have an image heavy site, chances are your loading time is high.
Instead of hosting images anywhere else to improve load time, take advantage of a CDN. You can use a free CDN service like CloudFlare, or pay a little bit of money and get a premium CDN service such as MaxCDN.
Bonus Tip – Image OptimizationÂ
When you are publishing an image on the web, it’s important for you to optimize it for faster loading.
Here are two practices that I suggest you follow:
- Resize the image before uploading: If your post requires a 750px width image, it’s a good idea to resize the image before uploading. This way you don’t scale down a bigger image, and your image size remains small. You can watch this video learn about resizing images.
- Compress the image: You can use a free tool like ImageOptim (For Mac OS), or use the ShortPixel WordPress plugin. By compressing an image, you are removing unessential data without reducing the image’s quality.
- Check out this post:Â Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins
At times, it’s not a bad idea to host your images on a 3rd party site.
Let’s say you clicked about 100 high resolutions images from an event or a travel trip, then you can host those pictures on a 3rd party site like Flickr or Dropbox and embed such albums on your blog. In a case like this, hosting images on a 3rd party site is not a bad idea.
Otherwise, I recommend you always host your blog images on your hosting server.
Do let me know where you host images on your blog. Are you hosting your images on a 3rd party site? Let me know in the comments below!
And don’t forget to share this post!
For resizing image on windows machine use ice cream image resizer and use Riot for image compressing. For WordPress Ewww Image Optimizer works better than WP Smush it
All my images are hosted on my blog hosting and i use cloudflare CDN for improving the speed and the security of my website.
Thank you for your your review on that question.
Bro…Regarding Image loading Speed, He can install Jetpack Plugin and Enable their Free Photon Image CDN, It is better than Cloudflare. The Images are Served from the WordPress.com Grid.
Thanks for Considering this in Advance 🙂
Hi Harsh,
Won’t JetPack’s Photon option let you host images on WordPress.com’s CDN while still self-hosting the rest of your blog??
http://jetpack.me/support/photon/
Still has all the downsides you mentioned, but it’s another option for those wanting to offload to a third party.
Matt
@Matt
I’m aware of Photon, but not a big fan of it. Undoubtedly it’s the most convenient way to offload images, and host it on free CDN, but I have seen few issues related to image caching in the past & that’s why didn’t mentioned it here. A better alternative would be CloudFlare which offers more than free CDN. If you haven’t tried it yet, I would suggest do give it a shot. Here are two guides which might interest you:
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/cloudflare-benefits.html
https://www.shoutmeloud.com/cloudflare-cdn-features-setup-guide.html
Harsh,
Reading the title of the post I was worried as to how the SEO of the image will come into play if the images are hosted at a 3rd party site.
Thank god! You nailed it completely and accurately ..
Hi Harsh,
Does embedded youtube videos affect my site performance? Does it make my site load time to slow? Could you please help on this.
Hii Harsh!!
I’m totally agreed with you point. As, hosting images on third party sites may be risky. I also faced such time loading issues with my site due to images size. But once I read about WP Smush It plugin on your site and found it to be much beneficial for me.
Thanks for updating us with such useful information.
-Nitin
Very useful post, I write a travel blog and host most of my images on third party…seems like i need to change all that..
but i have a question: Google is still indexing these images and shows them when I search for say site: desiTraveler.com and hit the images tab. But then you are right I rarely get any traffic from Image search…so …this is a bit puzzling for me. If the images are indexed why are they not coming in search traffic…
Images, are the major reason for high load time but not when you optimize them. Optimizing images before uploading is a great way of maintaining desired page load speeds. There are many online tools which can compress jpg and png images by 70%, without any significant quality loss.
A creative blog without pictures can not draw more readers. To generate more social media share and to increase internet traffic, images are important. For SEO perspective, Image optimization is required. Hosting images on 3rd party sites can create many problems, thanks for sharing such the excellent tips.
only required when you are making image rich website. for bau keep all that hosted on your server and optimize there
Hi Harsh,
I just re-did my images Harsh. Cut every one down – or most of them – to 300 X 225 or so. The load speed difference is stunning. I was bogged down 3 weeks ago. Today my blog loads pretty quickly and I still have more images to go. If I advise folks to do 1 thing it’s to crunch images before you upload them as you said, because you’ll need to manually go through all posts and re-size, and for about 100 posts this took me 3 weeks.
Ryan
You can use Plugin like Wp-smush also. It crunches images automatically on upload as well as previous posts.
Images takes lots load time on any blog, optimizing the images and using a CDN is really good way to get it fix. Thanks for this nice post.
Just use Amazon Cloudfront CDN, it is fast and cheap. Way better than MaxCDN.
Hi Harsh,
images also effect in blog loading speed.Thanks for guide to host blog images it help to improve blog loading speed.keep up it.
Have a nice week ahead.
If a single web page include more then 5 images, it should host over CDN on a static domain.
The major benefits on self-hosted images.
1. The permalink will be #SEO-Friendly as comparison to third party permalink.
2. Your images will have good expiration timeout for Cache.
3. Over separate directory for images, The backup will be easy to manage.
concerning blogger, because im on blogger.
I thought my images are being hosted on my google plus account.
I never once stumbled against Picasa.
and if thats true, how do I acess my picasa account
Hi Samex,
I think if you go through your Google+ account you will find it.
Emenike
Hi Eminike
Just login to your google account and go to https://picasaweb.google.com
I used to host images on photobucket and i didn’t find any problem with that. The only problem i found is resizing of image and thanks for linking the video tutorial in the post.
Currently using Smush It for Compressing My WordPress Images. Thanks for the other Tool too.
Kind Regards
Hey Harsh, That was really a wonderful article!
Your articles are actually very awesome and of great help to newbie bloggers like us!
I was wondering if you could write an article on issues we come across in the Google PageSpeed Test. Thanks in advance! 🙂