Your Website is Fat: Four Brands Share Best Practices to Optimize Images, Reducing Page Weight

In marketing, optimized images are critical to the user experience, brand perception and ultimately business success. In fact, research shows that it takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave.

Too often, fat images slow down websites, frustrate users, and negatively impact the customer experience. Recent studies report that internet users spend six hours and 35 minutes online daily. In addition to giving users some valuable time back, well-optimized images can significantly enhance website performance, boost SEO rankings, and improve conversion rates.

In this article, we’ll explore image optimization best practices from elite brands – all providing substantial business benefits:

1. Reduce Page Weight

Reducing page weight is essential for improving load times, especially as images often make up most of a webpage’s data. Shinola, an American lifestyle brand based in Detroit, Michigan, was able to produce a 50% reduction in page weight across the board due to smaller image sizes, resulting in a 10% to 15% percent reduction in time-to-render for most images on the site, averaging savings of a full second shaved from page load times.

The reduction in page weight also meant lower data usage for mobile users, further improving the overall user experience and ensuring that potential customers stayed engaged with the site. This is imperative, as studies show over half of consumers say they reduce or stop spending at a business after a very poor experience.

2. Mobile First

A recent study reports around 54% of overall web traffic comes from mobile devices, , so it’s vital to prioritize mobile-first image optimization. By optimizing their images for mobile, Zadig&Voltaire, a French luxury fashion brand, improved their page speed by an impressive 66%. This improvement was achieved by using responsive images tailored to various device types and screen resolutions, ensuring that users on smartphones received appropriately sized images without unnecessary data consumption. In addition to saving customers valuable time, the company also saved engineering time and costs while optimizing their website performance on the backend.

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3. Consider next-gen image formats for the win

Next-generation image formats like AVIF and WebP offer significant advantages over traditional formats like JPEG and PNG. These new formats provide superior compression, allowing for smaller file sizes without compromising image quality.

Nikkei, one of the world’s largest financial news websites, leveraged these formats to reduce image file sizes by up to 38%. By converting their images to WebP, Nikkei achieved faster load times across their site.

This not only improved user satisfaction but also had a direct impact on their SEO performance, as Google rewards faster websites with higher search rankings. Adopting next-gen image formats is a straightforward yet powerful way to enhance your website’s performance and improve your business outcomes.

4. Automate – save time and resources

For businesses that handle large volumes of images, automation is key to maintaining efficiency and freeing up valuable resources. Queensmith, a UK company that offers premium jewelry, such as engagement and wedding rings that are ethically made at a fair price, has a website that serves around 180,000 images, with 25 million image requests monthly.

Responsive design is a crucial goal for the company, as 66% of their visits occur on mobile devices. Previously, the content team had to manually crop and resize each image and create a dozen variants. This labor-intensive process still didn’t solve the daunting needs of ever-expanding combinations of devices, browsers, and bandwidth environments. As the product catalog grew, it became extremely difficult for the content team to keep up with the image optimization needs. The company has successfully transformed its image process, ensuring a seamless and responsive experience for its customers.

By automating some of the time-consuming functions, Queensmith has successfully transformed its image process, ensuring a seamless and responsive experience for its customers.  Instead of doing the tedious image cropping and resizing, the Queensmith content team can now create a single high-resolution version for each image and dynamically reformat and resize it for different user environments.

Conclusion

Optimizing images is not just a technical requirement—it’s a strategic business decision that can lead to substantial improvements in website performance, SEO rankings, and customer satisfaction. In fact, 57% of internet users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed website on mobile.

By following these best practices, businesses can deliver faster, more visually compelling digital experiences that drive better results across the board.

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