[Support request] Featured image for SEO

[Bernhard]

Hi,
some time ago I substituted my featured images with low res versions to speed up load times. Now I see that the images are no more ranked on Google.
On some pages I surpressed the featured image via Elements and inserted carousels with smart slider 3. These pages are shown without featured image in the search results.
On most pages I’m using jpg image 60% quality width 672px. Images are then resized by WordPress for mobile etc.
My question is if there is a way to show to the search engines a higher resolution like 1200px width but to load on the pages 672px (or smaller as by type of device).
Most important for me is that pages load fast on mobile even on a bad mobile network.

[Tom]

Hi there,

How are the images displaying in the search results?

If you can’t display them as images on the actual page, you might need to use JSON+LD to set the image. A plugin like Yoast should allow you to do that.

[Bernhard]

Hi Tom,
some days ago I found Google search results where with each link an image was shown. Actually I’m not able to reproduce it but I have seen there that my page with the carousel had no image included.

I looked into Yoast but nothing found. Can you suggest a plugin for strong image compression – webp may not be used with the free plan of Cloudflare and I believe, there are still some other problems with webp in WordPress.

[Bernhard]

OK, I made one more check and found Google showing search results with images in the mobile search. Referring to the page with the slider, today Google shows in the search results the second image of the smart slider 3 carousel. Probably last time, Google took the page right in the moment when then slider passed from one image to the next.
Now I have only to figure out how to supply to Google high resolution images and to load on the pages low resolution.

[Tom]

I think Google will choose the image from your content, but I’m not 100% sure. I assume Yoast allows you to set an image for the page, but you might need to ask them.

[Author]

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