Images Are Probably What's Slowing You Down
Practical, plain-language notes on getting more from your website, written by the team doing the work.
Practical, plain-language notes on getting more from your website, written by the team doing the work.
When a page speed test comes back slow, most people assume the problem is complicated: server config, framework choice, some deep technical issue. In practice, the single biggest cause on business websites is much simpler: images.
The five-megabyte photo nobody resized
A photo straight off a modern phone or camera is often four or five megabytes, sized for a print far bigger than any screen. Uploaded straight into a page builder, that same file gets squeezed into a 400-pixel-wide box, but the visitor's browser still has to download the whole five megabytes before it can shrink it down. On a phone, on patchy wifi, that alone can take several seconds, before anything else on the page even starts.
Multiply that by a handful of team photos, a logo, and a couple of banner images, and a single page can be carrying ten times the data it actually needs. None of it makes the page look better. It just makes it slower.
What to check on your own site
Open your homepage on a phone with a stopwatch running, or use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights, and look specifically at image size versus displayed size. If a tool flags images as "not properly sized" or "not served in modern formats," that's usually the fix with the biggest payoff and the least risk: nothing about how the page looks needs to change.
The fix is mechanical, not creative: resize images to the dimensions they're actually displayed at, and serve them in a modern, lighter format. Done properly, pages that took four or five seconds to load can drop under two, without a single design change.
