Guide
Speed up your website: the beginner’s guide to image optimization
September 2026 · 7 min read
On most websites, images are the single heaviest thing the browser downloads. They are also the easiest thing to fix. Cut their size and your pages load faster, your Core Web Vitals improve, and your search rankings follow.
1. Pick the right format
Serve WebP for photos and complex graphics, PNG only when you need lossless sharp edges, and JPEG as a fallback for older systems. Format choice alone can cut image weight by a third.
2. Resize to the display size
A phone photo at 4000 px displayed at 800 px is carrying 25× more data than it needs. Cap the max width to the largest size you actually display (commonly 1920 px for heroes, 1280 px for content). PixelPress does this with the “Max width” control.
3. Compress to the sweet spot
For JPEG and WebP, quality between 75 and 85 is the sweet spot: invisible quality loss, 60–90% smaller files. Start at 80 and adjust by eye.
4. Batch your whole library
PixelPress handles batches — drop in an entire folder of product photos and compress them all at once, then download them together. It turns an hour of tedious work into a few seconds.
5. Measure the result
After optimizing, run your page through a speed test. You will usually see the largest single improvement come from images, not from code or fonts.