Product Image Best Practices
Product Image Best Practices
Section titled “Product Image Best Practices”As an online retailer, images are arguably the most important element involved in selling your products. High-quality imagery not only helps potential buyers make purchasing decisions, but also impacts how your site performs. Poorly optimized images can slow down your store and hurt conversions.
In this guide, we’ll cover some key things to consider when uploading images to Shopify.
Image Size
Section titled “Image Size”Not to be confused with file size (covered below) — image size refers to the exact height and width of your image, usually measured in pixels.
The main consideration is to avoid making your images unnecessarily large. For example, uploading a 4000px-wide image when it only needs to display at 1000px forces browsers to load extra data, which slows down your site.
🔮 Shopify’s recommended dimensions are linked at the bottom of this page.
File Size
Section titled “File Size”File size refers to the “digital weight” of your image — how much space it takes up on your server. It’s typically measured in kilobytes (KB) or megabytes (MB).
- Larger file sizes usually mean more detail.
- However, excessively large files can severely impact site speed.
Best practice: Keep product images under 1MB whenever possible. This strikes the right balance between quality and performance.
There are several tools available to compress images without noticeably reducing quality.
Aspect Ratio
Section titled “Aspect Ratio”Aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and height of an image, expressed as two numbers like 16:9 (landscape) or 4:5 (portrait). It defines the shape of your image, not its size.
Because a large percentage of users browse on mobile devices, it’s important to consider how your images display in both portrait and landscape viewports.
Shopify often lets you upload different versions of an image for desktop and mobile. Use this feature to prevent awkward cropping and to ensure the right aspect ratio for each device.
- ✅ Upload the correct aspect ratio for your use case.
- ✅ Always optimize your images before uploading.
- ✅ Bigger does not equal better.