Optimize Product Images

Optimizing the images you use for your products has a number of benefits, including improved appearance, page loading time, and SEO. This article will walk you through the ways that you can optimize your Payhip product images.

In this article:

• Image dimensions
• Desktop vs mobile
• Compress your images
• SEO for images
• Social media preview images

Image dimensions

There aren’t specific dimensions that we can recommend for product images - it’s really all about the ratio of the two dimensions (the aspect ratio). You can play around with different aspect ratios on Payhip to find the one that works best. Alternatively, choose an aspect ratio and design your product images to fit (e.g. square images for 1:1 ratio).

To change the aspect ratio:

1. Log into your Payhip account.
2. Launch the store builder by going to Store in the top navigation bar, then clicking Launch Your Store Builder (or by clicking Account > Store Builder).
3. Navigate to your Products page.
4. Click on the Collection section.
5. Under Settings, you’ll see a dropdown for Aspect ratio.
6. Select the aspect ratio that works best for your images.
7. Publish your changes.

To have your images display at the same size they were uploaded at, choose “Adapt” from the aspect ratio dropdown. Note that this can look a little messy with images of different sizes.

Desktop vs. mobile

You’ll also want to consider how your images will look on both desktop and mobile devices. To switch between these views, click the dropdown at the top right of your screen:

You can change the number of columns your products will display in on desktop under Settings:

And you can choose the number of columns on mobile under Mobile Layout:

Compress your images

Another way to optimize your images is to compress them so your store page will load faster. There are lots of online tools out there for this, e.g. https://tinypng.com/

SEO for images

Adding alt tags (descriptions) to your images helps with SEO. To add alt tags to your product images on Payhip, find the Advanced Options section for your product and click the cog icon.

A tip for writing alt tags is to use descriptive, plain language, e.g. "Colorful recipe book cover featuring enticing dishes and vibrant ingredients with the title 'Delicious Creations Cookbook' prominently displayed."

Social media preview images

For coaching, courses, memberships, and bundles, you are able to upload a product thumbnail that will be used as the preview image on social media. For digital and physical products, the first product image will automatically be used for the preview. (Tip: You can drag and drop your product images around to rearrange them.)

If you change the image you want to use on social media, it might not update right away. Facebook has a handy tool to fix this called the Sharing Debugger.

Here’s what to do:

1. Go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/
2. Paste in your product page URL and click Debug.
3. Click the Scrape Again button.
4. Under Link Preview, you’ll see the image update.

Hopefully, that helps you optimize your images! For any questions, please reach out to us at contact@payhip.com.