Contents04 sections
Image optimization is the easiest speed win there is, because oversized images are almost always the biggest reason a site is slow. We audit pages loading 10MB of images when the whole homepage should come in under 2MB. Fixing that takes an afternoon and no code.
01Why Are Images So Heavy?
A photo off your phone is around 4,000 pixels wide and 3 to 5MB. The site shows it at 800 pixels. Every visitor downloads the whole file to see a fifth of it, and that happens for every image on the page.
02What Size Should Images Be?
The size they will be shown at, and no bigger. A hero banner might need 1,600 pixels across. A thumbnail might need 400. Resizing before upload is the single biggest cut you can make to a file, and it costs nothing.
03Which Image Format Should You Use?
JPEG for photographs. PNG for anything needing transparency or sharp text. WebP for both, because it gives better quality at a smaller size and every current browser reads it. Moving photos from PNG to WebP alone can halve the image weight of a page.
Squoosh.app is free: drop an image in, pick a format, move the quality slider, and watch the file size change. Aim for under 200KB per image. The hero can run a little bigger, and everything else should sit well under.
04How Much Faster Does It Get?
We have watched a page go from eight seconds to under two on images alone, with no code change, no hosting change, and no redesign. Faster pages keep more of the people who arrive, and Google reads speed as a ranking input. If you do one thing for your site this week, do this, and if you would rather hand it off, changes like that are inside the monthly care.