Image Optimisation: Make Your Website Faster Today

Images usually make up most of a web page’s weight — and unoptimised images are the most common reason sites load slowly, especially on mobile data.

The good news: fixing them is one of the easiest, highest-impact speed wins there is.

Right-size before you upload

A photo straight off a phone or camera can be 4,000 pixels wide and several megabytes — far bigger than any web page needs. Resize images to the size they will actually display (often 1,200–2,000px wide) before uploading.

Serving a giant image scaled down in the browser wastes the visitor’s data and your load time.

Compress and use modern formats

Compression strips invisible data to shrink file size with no visible quality loss. Modern formats like WebP and AVIF are far smaller than old JPEGs and PNGs while looking just as sharp.

Tools and CDNs can convert and serve these formats automatically, so visitors get the smallest file their browser supports.

Lazy-loading and dimensions

Lazy-loading defers off-screen images until they are needed, so the top of the page appears faster. Setting width and height on every image stops the layout jumping as things load — which Google rewards.

We build these in by default, and optimise images automatically on every site we host.

Modern formats and lazy loading

WebP images are typically 25–35 percent smaller than equivalent JPEG or PNG files with no visible quality difference. Most modern browsers support WebP, and tools like Squoosh or Cloudflare Image Resizing convert images automatically. Serving WebP instead of JPEG across a content-heavy site can reduce total page weight by hundreds of kilobytes.

Lazy loading defers the loading of images below the fold until the user scrolls towards them. This improves perceived load time significantly because the browser prioritises images the visitor can actually see. A single HTML attribute enables lazy loading — it takes seconds to add and requires no plugin or JavaScript. We implement both WebP serving and lazy loading as defaults on every site we build.