Image optimization tool
New crawl option “Crawl external links”
Full support of WebP image format
Conclusions
Code-named “Lena”, Visual SEO Studio 2.2 is a feature release developed to answer some users’ frequent requests.
Image optimization tool
Visual SEO Studio is a great tool when it comes to performance analysis. It inspects vital performance signals throughout the whole website pages. And it is extremely good in detecting all over-sized image files, the Web heavy loads, thanks to the most recent Images Inspector feature.
It works so well that our users started to find so many case of heavy images that they asked us to give them also a tool to optimized them as soon as they detected them, without leaving the program to use an external tool.
"Optimize image" context menu item
"Optimize image" toolbar button
Image compression works differently depending on the chosen image format, and each image type has a format that better works with it.
The requirements were to support all most common web image formats, aid user finding a good compression level while keeping an acceptable image quality, permit to visually inspect the quality of the end result, and doing it quickly with an intuitive user interface.
When dealing with huge images it could be challenging.
"Optimize image" window
Not many people in SEO industry know that here at aStonish Studio (the company producing Visual SEO Studio) we have a long experience in image handling, since we also produce an image processing program for street photographers. So luckily we started from solid ground.
A real time-saver, the new feature is fully documented in the related image optimization Help page.
New crawl option “Crawl external links”
Finding broken external links is a normal SEO activity, yet with Visual SEO Studio – while possible – it was not straightforward to do.
Many users asked for improvements in the area, and we did listen.
That’s why we added the new “Crawl external links” scan option, to let you do it in a single run.
Now it is also easy to understand which website links lead to external resources.
"Crawl external links" option
Linked external pages will be crawled as well, and their content stored as normal internal pages. The spider will not go any deeper. Redirected URLs will be followed.
The new option is selected by default (unless you use the “Crawl again” function).
External pages will not be taken into account in most analysis reports (Custom Filters is the exception).
Full support of WebP image format
When we introduced image crawling and displaying, the program recognized also those in WebP file format, but could not display them nor compute their pixel size correctly.
Now the support is complete like for all other major image file formats.
"Content" panel showing a WebP image
Keep in mind that WebP – despite all its advantages – does still poses a barrier to its adoption, since it is not supported by Apple devices; webmasters are thus forced to recognize the client device and serve PNGs instead in case of Safari browser.
Conclusions
Visual SEO Studio 2.2 “Lena” eliminates some of what were considered two weak points of the program, turning them into points of strength.
Our users love the product, and we want them to continue this way with good reason.
The release also introduces minor improvements and bug fixes. For a full list of the changes, read the 2.2 Release Notes.
Curiosity: the code-name “Lena” is a homage to a 512x512 px image portraying the visage of a girl with a hat; its usage was so wide-spread as test image in all digital image processing courses to become part of its history.
What are you waiting for? Launch “Lena” and audit your website!
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