Your website images are huge and nobody told you
If your website is slow and your images are over 5MB each, the images are the problem. A photo straight off a phone or a stock site can be 20 to 50 times larger than it needs to be, and your visitors are downloading every byte before they see your page. Compressing and resizing those images is a 20-minute job that your agency should have done before launch.
Why image size matters more than anything else
When someone visits your site on their phone, their browser has to download every image on the page before it can finish loading. On a strong office WiFi connection, a 5MB image downloads in a second or two. On a 4G signal in a car park, it can take ten seconds or more.
If your homepage has six photos at 5MB each, that is 30MB the visitor has to pull down. Most people give up after three seconds. They are gone before they have seen what you do.
This is the single biggest reason small business websites feel slow. It is not the hosting. It is not the code. It is photos that were uploaded at full camera resolution and never touched.
What a properly sized image actually weighs
A well-prepared photo for a website should be somewhere between 100KB and 400KB. That is roughly 10 to 50 times smaller than what comes out of a phone camera.
The reasons are simple:
- A modern phone camera produces a photo around 4000 pixels wide. Your website displays it at maybe 1200 pixels wide. The other 2800 pixels of width are wasted.
- Photos are usually saved in a format meant for printing, not for the web. Re-saving them in a web-friendly format like WebP cuts the file size by half or more with no visible loss of quality.
- Compression strips out invisible data the camera adds (location, lens settings, colour profile) that the website does not need.
You do not need to understand any of this. You need someone who does it for you before the images go live.
How to check your own site in two minutes
Two free tools tell you everything you need to know.
PageSpeed Insights (search Google for it) - paste your website address in, hit analyse, wait 30 seconds. Scroll down to the section called "Opportunities" or "Diagnostics". If it mentions "properly size images" or "efficiently encode images" with a saving of more than a second, your images are the problem.
Right-click and inspect - on a desktop computer, right-click any image on your site and choose "Open image in new tab". The file size often shows in the tab title or the page info. Anything over 500KB for a single image is too big. Anything over 2MB is negligent.
If you see images labelled as 3MB, 5MB, or 8MB, that is what is killing your load time. It is not subtle. It is not a hosting issue. It is the photos.
Why your agency let this happen
There are three reasons an agency leaves uncompressed images on a live site, and none of them are good.
The first is that they used a WordPress theme that handles image resizing automatically, assumed it was working, and never checked. It often is not working, especially when photos are uploaded through the back end by a client.
The second is that they built the site, took the deposit, and stopped paying attention. Image optimisation is a launch-day task. If they were not looking at the site on launch day, they were never going to spot it.
The third is that they do not actually know how to do it properly. Image optimisation is one of those jobs that gets quietly skipped because nobody is going to complain about it the day the site goes live - the consequences show up months later when enquiries are lower than they should be.
Every agency knows about PageSpeed Insights. Most of them simply do not run it on the sites they have already been paid for.
What fixing it actually involves
The fix is genuinely simple. For each image on your site:
- Resize it to the maximum width it will ever be displayed at (usually around 1600 pixels for a banner, 800 pixels for a normal photo).
- Re-save it in WebP format, which most browsers have supported for years.
- Replace the original file with the smaller one.
For a typical small business site with 20 to 40 images, this is a half-day job. Once. After that, anyone uploading new photos should run them through a free tool like Squoosh (squoosh.app) first - drag the photo in, drop it out, done.
You should not be charged hundreds for this. If your agency wants to quote it as a separate project, that tells you they should not have launched the site in this state to begin with.
What to do next
Run PageSpeed Insights on your homepage right now. If it flags image sizing as a problem, send your agency the report and ask them to fix it at no extra cost. They built the site. This was their job.
If they refuse, or quote you a fee for fixing something that should have shipped working, you have learned what they think of you as a client.
If you want someone to fix it and keep it fixed, that is what I do. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and includes optimising any images you upload, plus actually checking the site loads properly on a phone. Most agencies charging £150/month for the same job have not opened your homepage in six months.
Frequently asked questions
How much should a website image weigh?
A normal photo on a website should be between 100KB and 400KB. A large banner image at the top of the page can be up to 600KB. Anything over 1MB is too big. Anything over 5MB is causing real damage to your load time.
Why does my agency upload huge images?
Usually because they uploaded the original file straight from the photographer or stock site without resizing or compressing it first. It takes 30 seconds per image to do properly. Many agencies skip the step because nothing visibly breaks when they do.
Can I compress images myself without breaking the site?
Yes. Use a free tool called Squoosh (squoosh.app) to compress each image, then replace the old one on your site through your content editor. Keep the same file name so existing links still work. If you do not have access to your content editor, that is a separate problem worth solving first.
How much does it cost to fix image sizes on a whole website?
For a typical small business site with 20 to 40 images, it should be a half-day job - around £150 to £250 as a one-off. If your agency quotes more than that, they are either inflating the work or admitting they do not know how to do it efficiently.
Will fixing image sizes improve my Google ranking?
Yes, indirectly. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor, especially on mobile. A site that loads in two seconds instead of ten will rank better and lose fewer visitors before they have seen the page. It will not move you from page five to page one on its own, but it removes one of the easiest reasons Google has to hold you back.
Is it worth paying someone monthly to keep images optimised?
Only if you regularly upload new photos - new products, new gallery shots, new team members. If your site is static and you rarely change anything, a one-off fix is enough. If you add images monthly, a small retainer that includes image optimisation pays for itself in time saved and search rankings retained.
Get your images sorted and keep them that way
I will audit every image on your site, compress and resize them properly, and check the result on a real phone. SkipTheAgency's Maintained plan is £65/month and includes optimising anything new you upload - so the problem does not come back.
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