Faster Websites: A Practical Image Optimization Checklist

1. Resize to the actual display size

This is the big one. A photo displayed in a 800-pixel-wide content column gains nothing from being 4000 pixels wide — the browser throws away 80% of the pixels after downloading all of them. Resize to the display width, or at most 2× the display width for high-DPI screens.

If your layout is responsive, decide on the largest sensible slot and export for that. One well-chosen size beats a blurry oversized original.

2. Pick the right format

For photographs on the web, WebP is the default choice in 2026: universal browser support, roughly 25–35% smaller than JPEG at equal quality, and transparency support when you need it. Keep PNG strictly for graphics with sharp text, logos, and lossless masters. Never serve photos as PNG.

3. Compress deliberately, not blindly

The quality slider isn't about a magic number — it's about where artifacts become visible for this specific image. Detailed photos hide compression well; images with smooth gradients and flat skies band early. Preview at 100% zoom and drag the quality down until you just start to see degradation, then back off one notch.

If you have a hard budget — say, 200 KB for a hero — use PPPP's target-size fit instead of hand-tuning. It searches for the highest quality that fits the budget automatically.

4. Strip what you don't need

Camera files carry metadata — EXIF data, GPS coordinates, camera serial numbers — that adds weight and can leak information you'd rather not publish. Exporting through an editor like PPPP produces a clean file containing only the pixels, which is both smaller and more private.

5. Serve it properly

The final steps happen on your site rather than in the editor, but they're cheap and compound the gains: add width and height attributes so the browser can lay out the page before the image loads, lazy-load anything below the fold, and use descriptive alt text — which helps accessibility and search at the same time.

• Hero image: resized, WebP, under 200 KB, loaded eagerly with dimensions set.
• Content images: resized, WebP, under 100 KB, lazy-loaded, with alt text.
• Logos and icons: PNG or SVG, as small as practical.

The payoff

Followed end to end, this checklist routinely cuts image weight by 80% or more with no visible difference. Pages render faster, bounce rates drop, and the improvement shows up directly in Core Web Vitals — which makes it one of the few optimizations that's good for users and search engines at once.