Article
Image optimisation: the fastest speed win most
Compression, formats, sizing and alt text - the four image habits that halve load times and lift rankings.
On most business sites we audit, images are seventy percent of the total weight - and almost all of it is waste. Photos uploaded straight from phones, banners exported at print resolution, logos at four times their display size. Fixing images is the fastest speed win available, and speed lifts everything: rankings, bounce, conversions, ad costs. Four habits.
One: compress everything before it ships
A photo straight from a phone camera is 3 to 6 megabytes. The same photo compressed for web is 150-300 kilobytes - visually identical to a buyer. Run every image through compression before upload (free tools abound; our builds do it automatically at the pipeline level). The buyer cannot tell the difference; the network can.
Two: right format for the job
Modern formats (WebP and friends) cut file sizes 30-50 percent further at the same quality - all modern browsers support them. Photos: WebP or compressed JPEG. Logos and icons: SVG - infinitely sharp at any size, a few kilobytes. Never a photo where an icon will do, never a screenshot of text (Google cannot read screenshots - if it is words, make it text).
Three: size to where it appears
An image displayed at 400px wide has no business being 4000px wide. Serve images at (at most) twice their display size for retina screens - nothing more. Responsive sizing (the browser picks the right file for the screen) is the finishing touch; it is what makes the same site fast on both a phone and a laptop.
Four: alt text - the free ranking and access win
Every image gets an alt attribute describing it in plain words. It is what screen readers speak to blind visitors, what shows when an image fails to load, and one more signal of what the page is about. “Wedding stage decoration at Shillong venue” beats “IMG_2047.jpg” - for accessibility, for image search, for everything.
The payoff, measured
A typical five-megabyte business page drops under one megabyte from images alone - load times halve, mobile bounce drops, and pages start competing for rankings they previously lost at the loading screen.
Images ship pre-optimised in everything we build - and the site teardown names your heaviest offenders if your site already exists.
Working on exactly this? Get a scoped quote, two minutes now, a written answer with price and timeline in two days.
Keep exploring