Images that don't weigh your store down

Right then,

If I open a slow store and look at what's actually landing on the page, nine times out of ten it's the pictures. Not the code, not the apps — the photographs. They're the biggest thing you're shipping, and they're also the thing you have the most control over.

Why your images are too big

The usual culprit is a lovely 3000-pixel-wide product shot being squeezed into a box that's 600 pixels wide on screen. The browser downloads the whole thing, then shrinks it. Your customer paid for all those pixels they never saw.

A few things I check every time:

• Format — modern formats like WebP are far smaller for the same quality
• Dimensions — the file shouldn't be much larger than the space it fills
• Compression — most photos can drop 40 to 60 per cent of their weight with no visible change
• The hero image — it's the first thing seen, so it deserves the most attention

Good enough beats perfect

You don't need a pixel-peeping obsession here. You need images that look crisp on a phone and don't make people wait.

A product photo nobody waits to see sells better than a flawless one that arrives too late.

Most platforms will do a lot of this automatically if you let them — Shopify, for instance, serves resized and reformatted images when your theme asks for them properly. The problem is usually a theme or an app that bypasses that and dumps the original file straight onto the page.

Where to start

Pick your five best-selling product pages and your homepage. Test them, look at the largest images, and sort those first. You'll feel the difference before you've touched anything else.

If you'd like me to look at what's actually being served on your key pages and where the easy wins are, book advisory time and I'll walk you through it.