How to Resize Images for Websites and Social Media

Why it's important to resize images

There are two main reasons to pay attention to image sizes: user experience and SEO.

Resizing images benefits the users browsing your website or checking out your social media page. It doesn't matter if they're on their mobile device or using a desktop or laptop-today's browsers are busy and they want to be able to see a pristine image that doesn't impact their digital experience.

It's easy to ignore good image quality because it's expected. But a lousy web experience is usually caused by photos that are either far too big and take a lot of time to load, causing users to wait, or far too small and pixelated or stretched to be barely recognizable.

Resizing images can also benefit page speed, which impacts your ranking in organic search results. Page speed is the time it takes for all contents of a web page to load. Images smaller than the raw image file size (which is usually much larger than what appears on a website) load faster.

Types of image resizing

There are a few different ways to resize a photo and preserve its quality. Consider the following types of image resizing below.

1. Scale down: This makes the image smaller. In many cases, the quality won't drastically reduce if you scale the image down.

2. Upsize: Making a small image larger without creating pixelation is tricky. You need a quality image resizing tool to upsize an image without stretching it and hurting the overall resolution.

3. Crop: This refers to omitting part of the image by moving in or out to capture a specific part of it. For example, a wide group shot can be cropped to only show a handful of people close-up.

How to resize images without sacrificing quality

Resizing images to optimize the web experience isn't complicated but it does require a certain finesse to ensure your maintain the image's overall quality. You can get the image sizes you need using Squarespace's free Image Resizer following these steps.

1. Select file and format

First and foremost, you need to select the right image file and format. There are many different file types for images, but not all file types are compatible for use online. There are three main file formats for images, with two static options to choose from: JPEG or PNG.

A JPEG file is one of the most commonly used image file formats. They are the easiest to use on webpages because they're compressed to reduce the image file size. Photos are usually JPEGs. A PNG format often takes up more space than a JPEG, and is used for more complex images like graphics, illustrations, logos, and charts.

2. Reduce pixels and review dimensions

Once you've selected your image file and the format of your choice, that image is likely (or at least should be) high-resolution and will need to be significantly reduced to fit on a web page and load properly. For web pages, consider the website display size, which is 1920x1080 for a full screen.

You can choose from pre-determined settings for common social platforms and screen dimensions. To change the focus of the image, you can shift it by dragging the shaded circle in the tool.

3. Save and download

Click Confirm Selection and click on individual images to preview what they'll look like once resized. You can go back to make adjustments as needed. Once you're satisfied with the way the image looks, download to a folder before uploading to your site or social media.

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