If your WordPress site takes four seconds or more to load, you're not alone. When we look into a slow site, the cause is almost always the same thing: images. The good news is that images are also the easiest thing to fix.
Why images slow everything down
Photos straight off a phone or a stock library are often several megabytes each and thousands of pixels wide. Your page might only display them at a few hundred pixels, but every visitor still downloads the full file. A home page with a few of those can easily weigh more than everything else on the page put together.
How we squeeze them
- Resize to the size you actually use. If an image is never shown wider than 1,600 pixels, there's no reason to upload one that's 5,000 pixels wide.
- Use modern formats. WebP and AVIF files are typically much smaller than JPEG or PNG at the same visual quality, and all modern browsers support them.
- Compress sensibly. Most photos can be compressed well beyond their original quality setting before anyone can see a difference.
- Lazy load anything below the fold. Images further down the page only load when a visitor scrolls to them.
- Set image dimensions. Telling the browser how big an image will be stops the page jumping around as it loads.
We set up compression on upload, so new images are handled automatically, and then work back through the existing media library.
The other usual suspects
Once images are sorted, these are the next places we look:
- Too many plugins loading scripts and styles on every page, even where they aren't used.
- Several font families and weights loading from different places.
- No page caching, or caching that's been switched off by a plugin conflict.
- No CDN, so visitors on the other side of the world wait for files to travel from one server.
- Slow or overloaded hosting, which no amount of tuning can fully make up for.
Can you really get to one second?
Often, yes, or close to it. Every site is different, and a page full of video or third-party tools will always have more to load. But a well-built WordPress site with properly sized images, sensible plugins, caching and a CDN should feel fast for almost every visitor.
Our Advanced and Premium plans include bulk image optimisation, compression on upload, database tuning and a global CDN, so this work is done for you and stays done.