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Make your images load faster — the 5-step checklist

July 14, 2026

Step 1: Resize to the display width

No spot on a normal website displays more than 1920 px; content areas are usually 700–1200 px. Shipping a 4000 px photo into a 1200 px slot sends 10× the pixels anyone can see. Resize before uploading — it's the single biggest saving, typically 70–90%.

Step 2: Convert photos to WebP

Same visible quality, 25–35% fewer bytes than JPG, supported by every current browser. PNG only for logos and transparency — a photo as PNG is the most expensive mistake in web images.

Step 3: Compress to a KB budget

Think in file-size targets, not quality percentages: content images under 100–150 KB, heroes under 200 KB, thumbnails under 30 KB. Quality 75–85 is visually indistinguishable from 100 at a fraction of the bytes.

Step 4: Keep the order — resize, compress, upload

Let your CMS do neither. WordPress, Shopify and the builders re-process what you give them with speed-optimized (quality-costing) settings, and some themes still serve the original. Deliver the finished file and the CMS has nothing left to break.

Step 5: Lazy-load everything below the fold

Images the visitor hasn't scrolled to shouldn't load yet. Modern CMSs add loading="lazy" automatically. One exception: the hero/LCP image must load eagerly — lazy-loading it makes your speed score worse, not better.

The result

A typical small-business page carries 5–15 MB of images and can get under 1 MB with the five steps above — a page that loaded in 6+ seconds on mobile starts rendering in under 2. No plugin subscription, no CDN contract: just correctly prepared files.

Try it yourself — free, no upload

Compress to a KB target Fix your hero image

Frequently asked questions

What slows a website down more — many images or big images?

Big images, almost always. Ten well-optimized 80 KB images (800 KB total) load faster than one 3 MB phone photo. Size per image is the lever: get every image under its target and the count barely matters.

What is the right order: resize first or compress first?

Resize first, then compress, then upload. Compressing a 4000 px photo and letting the CMS scale it down wastes most of the compression. everyimg does both steps in the correct order automatically.

Should I use an image CDN or optimization plugin?

They help, but they are a second line of defense with monthly costs and settings to maintain. Uploading correctly sized images in the first place is free and often makes the plugin unnecessary for small sites.

How fast should my page be?

Under 2.5 seconds for the main content (Google’s LCP threshold), ideally under 2. Most visitors abandon pages that take longer than about 3 seconds — every additional second costs measurable conversions.