Search Console Warning – Image size smaller than recommended size

I tried several things this morning and found that a 1200 pixel featured image shows up perfectly on Facebook when the page is linked, so too on Twitter.

I can keep my smaller images at the top of my pages.

So, I’m thinking AMPforWP could initiate automatically changing the featured image to 1200 pixels…

Here’s the page where I recorded my “study’ : https://off-grid-insights.com/featured-image-1200-pixels-problem/

@considerthis1 that’s great news for you…. but starting anything automatically may solve your issues as well as create issues for others.

Not everybody uses 1200px wide images.

1200px TALL images work too.

There is a factor of image weight as well that is even MORE important than the size for ranking on Google (and I imagine that most people using AMP is trying to rank higher on SERPs) as it affects the Desktop and Responsive versions of a website.

Don’t assume that what works for your site will work for every site.

I thought about how different sized images would all become 1200 pixels across, and that seemed like it would be efficient with no drawbacks. But, I forgot about overall weight…

Do we know, for sure, whether the overall pixel count has an upper limit?

I was really surprised to see my 1200 pixel featured images on my desktop pages showing up clearly on social media.

Google no longer ranks my pages high enough for it to matter. I think several months ago I asked for a change, which was briefly made, then removed because it caused so many errors for others… and I didn’t check my pages in search console. All my visible pages were fine, but something had made a hundred non existent “pages” with bits of words as if the same url had been fragmented dozens of different ways. Since I didn’t catch the huge number of 404 pages, I’m thinking Google decided to downgrade my site permanently. I’m shattered. But… what can I do?

@havig

You state that 1200 high works too, when Google themselves clearly state that it needs to be 1200 wide?

And what’s this about image weight vs size? Nobody uses the term ‘image weight’. It doesn’t exist.

By weight you actually mean the file size? And by size you actually mean the image dimensions?

I don’t understand where all this confusion comes from.

@domdomdomdom

A few hundred pages is nothing. You can do this in a week or two if you make a plan for it and process a part daily.

As for worrying about images making your total page size too big…

1. Google itself is asking for it. Do you honestly believe you’re going to get penned for feeding the beast what it wants?

2. You can save your 1200 wide (jpg) images at 85% quality or less, which will keep them relatively small.

3. AMP is also about not executing scripts and downloading a whole bunch of other components separately, not just size. Just so long as it’s easy to render for weak mobile devices with shitty connections.

(Let’s hope 5G will deliver us from this relentless AMP mess in about a decade or so.)

@considerthis1

This plugin can’t make your images 1200 wide. You need to do it yourself manually, or somebody needs to write a plugin that will resize featured images automatically.

The latter could happen, because there now exists a market demand for it. I’d do it myself if I wasn’t so damn busy. I’m not going to sit around and wait for it myself.

@ampforwp

How come the disabling of the featured image isn’t available for all themes?

It would save loads of bandwidth on our Design 1/2/3 AMP pages.

I am now going to start changing each of my featured images to 1200 pixels, across. Over my 5 sites, that’s about 500 images… But I’ll start with my health site which is the most views…

Maybe this will encourage Google to start showing my site in search results again…

Who knows?

That’s the spirit. Although these are just warnings, not errors. These 1200px wide image are for appearing in some sort of news carousel. It won’t magically fix your rankings if something else is holding them back.

There is a nifty plugin that will export your urls for you.

You can paste the urls into a spreadsheet and create a column next to them, where you keep track of whether you’ve processed a certain page yet.

This will help you divvy the work up over a number of days/weeks.

that is so clever, and so nice of you to suggest. Thank you!!!

It was harder getting a handle on this than I anticipated. I didn’t realize the height had to be 675… not larger. All my images were squares, so changing them to 1200 wide didn’t work “perfectly” LOL

It took hours today to come to grips with the different aspects… but now that I’ve got it, I think I can do “pretty many” pages tomorrow and Tuesday. ??

Thank you so much for all your help with this … situation. ??

@considerthis1

Where does it say there’s a max 675 height limit? It’s not on the google webmaster guideline page linked earlier in this thread. I’ve fixed a site with higher than 675 images and search console tells me the validation is ‘looking good’.

@domdomdomdom

We? So you’re deciding for everybody else?

Not sure what you’re trying to say, but I highly recommend that people learn the existing definitions of words and then use them correctly. Talking about ‘size’ in reference to ‘dimensions’ creates confusion and costs time.

Changing your featured images won’t change anything about your ranking. If you’re letting featured images somehow influence the formatting of your page, you’re not in control.

@domdomdomdom

Actually, I did give a useful tip on how to start solving this problem to @considerthis1. However, whenever the boat gets rocked, it’ll take a while for the ripples in the water to smooth out. There’s no telling what helpful stuff the community will come up with in the near term. For some, patience will be required.

I’m a developer and could automate upscaling of featured images if I wanted to. If you’re not a dev, you can pay one to build it for you. Or just wait until someone builds it for free. Maybe there’s a WP plugin out there that can be applied to the problem. WP’s own media library won’t let you scale images larger, only lower.

Google is asking for 1200px wide images, so there’s no rational reason to assume it will have negative impacts on your SEO. Especially if you weren’t actually displaying the featured image in the first place (a reference to it will still appear in the AMP source), like me. And in that case, the image also can’t possibly have a negative impact on your layout. Literally nothing changes.

If you are displaying the featured image and do not want to display it quite so large (and assuming you want to keep using this plugin), then you’ve got no option but to wait until this plugin’s authors add an option for setting maximum limits on the displayed featured image.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by Jay.

@domdomdomdom so far, the only way is to manually increase the dimensions of the image to 1200px wide OR tall.

You can test doing this to a single post, test the AMP page with Live URL Testing and you will SEE it PASSES the verification.

On the other hand, you are correct. Increasing the size of this image will increase its weight.

The only workaround is to install an image compression plugin to reduce “losslessly” the several additional versions that wordpress creates.

The featured image is used to display your blog articles on your blog page (or pages). Depending on your theme and design, this could take place on your home page, category page and/or blog page (or wherever else you may have inserted them unless you don’t show the featured image on your blog, then this becomes a non-issue)

I am making a distinction between blog and blog post or article. You can control this image showing on an individual article (be it on the AMP version or on your own desktop/responsive version) But you would have to modify the behavior of how YOUR theme displays the blog’s featured image and that’s where the impact to SEO lies.

I think this bears repeating: The SEO impact does NOT occur at the AMP page level, it happens at the Desktop/Responsive levels and it is created by the NEW AMP requirement to display on the Carousel.

As I said earlier, WordPress creates several versions of your image and these are not compressed by default.

If you display your blog on any page, the page size will definitely increase (unless you compress the resized images), this will impact your page load times, the UX experience (test with Chrome Lighthouse and you’ll see) and other pieces of the puzzle that I won’t go into detail here.

Anyway, this is a “new” requirement from Google AMP (not Google) that seems to be not well thought out (as it disregards the impact on the desktop and responsive versions) but it makes sense from a business perspective if you plan on forcing websites to host with you and you only. (Transforming your site into full AMP… Hint! Hint!)

I am testing my dear battleship website (there is no way I will test my sites with half a million visits/mo) and here’s what I found:

1- Again. The image does NOT have to be 1200px wide, it CAN be 1200px tall (for those that may have both image styles) @considerthis1 you could have increased your images to 1200 x 1200.

Note: If you only care about the AMP Carousel, there are several plugins that will resize your images on the WordPress repository.

2- This is something the AMP developers will have to address: The validation check fails if you have AMP Categories enabled (unless your wordpress categories have a featured image – mine don’t) and Search Console does not validate the rest of the fixed AMP pages after performing the initial test and failing.

Temporary Solution: My current workaround was to DISABLE categories/archives on AMP. I do not endorse doing this willy-nilly. Evaluate the impact on your site first.

3- Ideally, AMP would have its own “featured image” where you can insert whatever size is required but I can safely assume, the level of effort to implement this will be considerable.

4- Meanwhile, if you REALLY want to change your featured image sizes, I strongly advise you compress the image versions that WordPress creates to minimize the impact on SERPs for your desktop/responsive site. You can d this with an image compression plugin)

Finally and contrary to what @jwbats states on MY ticket, an image is a type of file and way more specific than “file”. I would strongly request @jwbats to open his OWN ticket and insult everybody there. Not on mine. Also, I am pretty tired of reading his “advice” on the constant flood of email updates generated.

Hope this helps.

Hi Havig,
I don’t think 1200 high will work. That’s the width dimension. The height dimension that goes with it is 675. Any bit of an image that’s over 675 tall, is cut off in Google Search.

I’ve been testing my pages…

Hi DOMDOMDOMDOM,

My wordpress pages have a box on the right hand side for Featured Image. And, I use Schema Org’s Rich Snippets. So I have to put the 1200 x 675 image into each of those boxes to have it appear in Google Search results.

The rest of the images on a page aren’t required to be 1200 x 675 for Google Search.

??

Karen

Hi Jay, When I began changing my images I discovered that the embedded words were not showing when the image was displayed on Twitter or Facebook. Chusbas very kindly directed me to Google materials that discuss the width to height ratios… When I didn’t totally understand he posted the 675 height requirement for me, with supporting Google materials.

As soon as I implemented that my images displayed properly, and began to show up in Google Search.

What makes it all so tricky to increase the width of featured images is that the old requirements were for 300 x 300, a square. Now it’s 1200 x 675, which is clearly not a square… so making a featured image comply is a little more tricky than simply making it larger…

Chusbas replied to me on my thread about how to

oops… that got published before I was ready.

Anyway, Chusbas replied to me on my thread about how to increase the AMP featured image without increasing the featured image on a desktop page…