Potential of image optimization on websites of rural tourism facilities in Poland

The success of a rural tourism business largely depends on promotional activities. Having developed a tourist product, owners of rural tourism facilities should therefore inform the buyers about it. Usually, they rely on websites and social media for this purpose. However, for a website to fulfill its function, it should be of high quality. The improvement of website quality can be achieved through measures which include search engine optimization (SEO) and content and graphics optimization. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential of image optimization on websites of Polish rural tourism facilities. The research covered 1000 paid domain websites. The largest part of the sites surveyed were rated good in terms of graphic file optimization. In spite of this, it was possible to reduce the size of graphic files covered by this study and used in the research model by as much as 67% without significantly deteriorating their quality. This research showed that image optimization has no direct impact on the outcome of an SEO audit, and that images can be optimized even for websites with high final scores.