Pinterest Image Tips – 3 Important Things You Need To Know [Infographic]

Pinterest has updated many Pinterest Image Tips recently, so we’ve updated this post to give you the latest on how to get more views, saves and shares from your website – including 3 super important Pinterest Image tip updates from Pinterest!

3 Important Things You May Have Missed about Pinterest Images [Infographic]

DONNA MORITZ | UPDATED JUNE 18, 2019 (POSTED OCTOBER 2013)

Posts on this blog may contain affiliate links, which means we receive a small commission at no cost to you if you purchase through a link.

Pinterest has had some important changes to their platform in the past couple of years, including better analytics to keep track of your pins and more emphasis on pin creative.

In this post we’ve taken some of the best practice advice from Pinterest, including:

this interview conducted by Tailwind with the Head of Product at Pinterest.
Pinterest’s advice about creative best practices on their blog
a webinar that Pinterest presented on best practices for Pin design and creative (called What’s Great Creative on Pinterest).

There is loads of advice out there from Pinterest so we wanted to update this popular post to summarize it into 3 simple things you can do to get started with creating engaging Pins and visuals for Pinterest.

We’ve also created a “Cheat Sheet” Infographic that will help you to get up to speed on best practice for dimensions, best Pinterest image size, and design of your images on Pinterest.

Continue to the rest of the post to see expanded advice on how to implement the 3 strategies. Feel free to save the infographic to Pinterest for later or share it to your Group boards or Tribes.

Pinterest Image Tips Infographic:
You are welcome to share this Pinterest Image Tips Infographic but please ensure that the image links directly back to this post:

3 Image Tips You Should Use Right Now on Pinterest - Infographic If you share this infographic, please reference it to this post.
Even if you don’t post to Pinterest, take note of these Pinterest Image tips on the infographic. Just by having Pinterest-optimized images on your website, you are increasing the chances that website visitors will share your content. These tips are relevant to every business owner with a website, whether or not you are:

(a) posting to Pinterest with a personal or business Pinterest account

(b) not posting to Pinterest… but you have a website. Believe me, you are going to want to know about these tips, regardless of whether you are actively saving content to Pinterest or not!

Here are some things you need to know about Pinterest images and some of the recent advice from Pinterest about Pinterest image sizes. This includes best tips for Pinterest image search, and changes to best practice for Pinterest Images:

Pinterest Image Tips – 3 Important Things You Need To Know
Here are a few tips about the images you should create, what you add to the images and the best Pinterest image size recommendations to take notice of:

This is where you might be feeling a little overwhelmed. Pinterest actually wants us to create fresh, new pins for our popular content that we are sharing over and over.

Now I know that for some business owners, that seems like an impossible task. You might be thinking: “I’m lucky to create one vertical image for Pinterest, let alone create more than one. Gah!”.

I hear ya! It can be hard to be creative with your visual content when you are not a designer. Here are a few tips to do this quickly and easily:

Start with a great tool for creating DIY-design visuals. I personally use Easil for many of my designs (I even created the infographic in Easil ;o) but there are plenty of tools available like Canva, Stencil and Over.
Start with a template in your DIY Design tool. Design for non-designers is so much easier when you use templates. Don’t waste time designing from scratch. Use a stunning template created by a smart designer and then edit it to suit your brand. I did just that with the infographic in this post (using Easil). It’s easy to add some consistent branding by even just changing your logo and using your fonts.
Create your own template for repeated designs. Don’t go creating your Pins from scratch every time. Create your own template and re-use it in your favorite DIY Design tool. Then you can find a design you are happy with and convert it into your own template (as per item 1) to re-use again and again, modifying it each time.
Don’t just create one image – batch more than one. Copy the image and create another 1-3 images. Again, this might sound hard but it’s not if you know a few tricks.
Change out the background color to vary your image.
Change the heading. Instead of adding the title, why not pose a question, or perhaps a small line about how the product is used/benefits of the product.
Change up your fonts or colors.
Change the featured image to another product image or similar image.
By making these small changes you can easily create a few images in one sitting. Here is an image that I created to be my Pinterest image for this post:

Are you Missing these 3 Important Pinterest Image Tips?
I posed a question instead of just rehashing the title of this post!
I then created a similar image by making just a couple of simple changes to the image. All I changed was the background image and text color, as well as the wording and I have a new image:

You Really Should Pay Attention to these 3 Image Tips from Pinterest [Infographic]
Change up your colors or text for a different image!
These changes took me literally less than a minute to edit. I copied the original image, changed the colors, changed the background and I have my self a new image! You’ll see a third version of the image at the end of this post.

I could do more of these, changing out the black and white images to different images that I used in the infographic. See #2 below for more information about context, but it’s preferable to Pinterest if your image is related to the destination content. In this case I made the header image look similar to my infographic design.

If you have product shots or a series of product images to share, this can be very easy to do. Once you open your design tool to create one image, it’s super efficient to create more than one at the same time.

So, try not to freak out about creating extra images at the advice of Pinterest. Start by just creating one or two extras for your major blog posts or web pages. Expand from there.

And of course it makes sense to check your analytics to see if the extra effort is worth it. If your Pinterest shares and traffic from Pinterest image search start to improve, then definitely keep it up!

2. Add Context With Text
Pinterest has recommended that we add easy-to-read, bold, text on to our images. They state that we should add text that adds context and tells us how to use the product or service on your Pin.

Where possible the product or service should also be the focal point of the Pin, depending on the type of pin.

Hot Tip: Don’t just add the name of the article or blog post or Product name on your Pin. Add some additional information that helps the reader, or entices them to click through for more information. You should make sure that the landing page or end destination is related to the Pin. Pinterest looks for continuity of content when someone clicks through on your images.

3. Size Matters

The recommended or “best” Pinterest image size has been vertical or “tall” for many years now. But Pinterest have been more obvious about stating the Optimum Pinterest Image Size, as of late.

The recommended Pinterest image size is 600 x 900 in a vertical format. That doesn’t mean you can’t do longer pins or even infographics, but be aware that longer Pins may be truncated in the feed. To make it easier, most DIY tools have Pinterest optimized image templates, like these in Easil:

600 x 900 Pinterest templates in Easil

Hot Infographic Tip: Add the most important content or titles to the top part of longer Pins, so that you can encourage viewers and readers to click the image on the newsfeed to see the entire pin.

Previously the recommended width was 735 pixels but Pinterest is now recommending 600 wide as the best Pinterest image size. They go into the details of aspect ratio in this post. Here’s what Pinterest recommends:

When you pick images for Pinterest, think vertical. Most of our formats are vertical, and taller than they are wide. In our creative best practices, we recommend that you use a 2:3 aspect ratio for all of your Pins. “Aspect ratio” may sound complicated, but it’s just a way to talk about an image’s width, compared to its height. A 2:3 aspect ratio means that your image’s width is ⅔ its height. For example, your Pin could be 1,000 pixels wide, by 1,500 pixels tall. If your image falls outside this ratio, it could get truncated in people’s feeds and they won’t get to see your full Pin.

This information about ideal Pinterest image size is important to know if you want to showcase images (especially infographics) on Pinterest. Make sure that you maximise the allowable width of the image, but also be wary of not making your image ridiculously tall. Remember that longer pins will be truncated.

In a past edition of this post we quoted that images with 2:3 Pinterest image ratio (or “aspect ratio”) get more Repins. Now that is an expected standard size on Pinterest! Again, Tall images are still worth experimenting with as taller infographics still (in our experience) get lots of shares, but you don’t need to go really long to get results.

Bonus Pinterest Image Tip – Audit Your Pins
You might think this is not very exciting, but it is important that you check the shares and traffic of your Pins.

You see, images can be shared from your website to sites like Pinterest, even without you having a Pinterest account. People might be sharing images of your products and services without you even knowing – you don’t need to even have a Pinterest account for this to happen.

It’s time to do a check to do the following:

1. Check If The Images On Your Site Are The Right Size For Pinning.
Test by using the “Pin It” button to see if at least one image on each page is “shareable” and showcases that page, blog post, product page or service.  It’s preferable that you have at least one vertical image (ie 600 x 900 pixels).

Look at your website like a visitor would and try to pin a few images.  It is great if you pin your own content across to Pinterest, but the real magic happens when you have organic sharing by others.  If someone wants to spread the word about you, help them to do it!

2. Check What Is Being Shared Directly From Your Site.
You can do this via Pinterest’s Analytics or a tool like Tailwind. Or you can do a quick manual check on your website like this:

Type this URL into your browser: www.pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com.   In my case, “your website” would be /sociallysorted.com.au.
See what comes up!  By typing in this simple formula, you will be shown a scrolling display of all the images being shared from your Pinterest account – well worth looking at to see what people are sharing organically. Use this information to do more of what’s working!

Even if you start doing just one of these 3 strategies (optimizing your Pin size, creating more Pins or adding the right type of contextual titles/text on your Pins), you should see results. You’ll improve your ability to be found on Pinterest search, and get more Pins from your website