Oversized photos are one of the most common causes of a slow website. A phone camera can take a beautiful picture, but a 4-8 MB file has no place on an ordinary page. Upload images like that as they are, and the site will load slowly, especially on a phone.
Speed has a direct effect on the customer experience: if a page takes too long to load, someone can leave before they even see the service or the enquiry button. Optimising images is a simple task, and the site owner can handle part of it themselves.
What good looks like, and what usually goes wrong
For a website, a width of 1200-1600 px is generally enough, in WebP or a well-compressed JPG, weighing up to 100-250 KB for an ordinary photo. The common mistakes are simple: uploading a 4,000 px photo with no compression, using PNG for ordinary photographs, leaving file names like IMG_1234, or adding 20 photos to a single page with no editing down.
Where the risk lies
A slow site quietly chips away at enquiries: the page takes longer to load, mobile visitors leave, and backups and the admin area both get heavier as large files pile up.
What you can do yourself
- pick only the photos a page actually needs
- resize the width down to 1200-1600 px
- save as WebP or JPG
- name the file for what it shows, not IMG_1234
- check how the page looks and loads on a phone
When it is better to delegate
If there are a lot of photos, or the site is already heavy, it is better to set up systematic optimisation straight away: WebP, correct dimensions, lazy loading and caching. Zen Webmaster can set up automatic image optimisation so you are not doing this by hand for every single photo.
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