Optimise your images and gain more speed

The importance of optimised images in 2025

Who is this for? Website owners who manage their own content but aren’t professional designers or image editors.

Why image optimisation still matters

More and more business owners manage their websites on their own — they write blogs, upload photos, and update pages regularly. That’s great progress, but there’s a catch: large, unoptimised images can slow your website down dramatically. Even if your site looks perfect on screen, that doesn’t mean your images are optimised. A photo that appears fine visually might still be much larger than necessary in terms of file size, which leads to slower load times — and fewer visitors staying on your site.

Speed matters - for users and for Google

While internet speeds keep improving (4G, 5G, Wi-Fi 6), that doesn’t make oversized images harmless. Fast connections only hide the issue. Google has made it clear that page speed affects user experience and search ranking. There’s also a practical angle: faster websites are easier and cheaper for crawlers to read and index. By making your website lighter, you’re helping both your visitors and search engines — and you might even earn a better ranking.

Three simple steps to optimise your images

Check the recommended image size for each section of your site. Ask your webmaster what pixel dimensions work best. You don’t need to memorise the exact numbers — just understand the difference between image dimensions (pixels) and file size (kilobytes or megabytes).
Resize your images before uploading. Any free image editor will do (e.g. XnView, Photopea, or even built-in tools like macOS Preview or Windows Photos).
Compress and convert to WebP. Use an online optimiser such as Kraken.io or Website Planet’s compressor. Better yet, save your images directly as WebP, a modern format supported by all major browsers. WebP files are often 50–80% smaller than JPEG or PNG equivalents, without any visible quality loss.

Why it’s worth your time

Oversized images hurt your SEO performance, waste bandwidth, and frustrate mobile visitors using slower connections. If you already know how to update your website, it’s worth spending an extra 30 minutes learning how to create fast-loading, WebP-optimised images. It’s a small effort with a big impact — for your visitors, your rankings, and your website’s overall performance.

Good to know

There are still some browsers in use that do not support the WebP format, but the number of internet users relying on these browsers is roughly 1% of all users.

If you are concerned and would prefer not to lose even this - gradually decreasing - 1%, we recommend using a solution that generates a JPG or PNG format as a so-called fallback for such browsers. This solution needs to be implemented within the platform you are using.

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We’ve been using the WebP format for building our clients’ websites for several years now. Initially, JPG and PNG were the default formats, and the website would only convert images to WebP if the browser supported it. However, in our latest projects, WebP has become the default, and we only convert to other formats if the client’s browser is so outdated that it cannot display WebP.

If you’d like to improve your website’s speed or have any technical questions, feel free to get in touch. In most cases, we even offer free advice, provided there’s no need for an in-depth analysis of the system in question.