2026-05-14

5 ways to cut your site's image payload without hurting quality

Practical, low-risk techniques to reduce total image weight on a website — resizing, compression, responsive sources, and format conversion.

Images are still the single biggest contributor to page weight on most sites. A handful of changes usually recover most of the available savings.

1. Resize at the source

Never ship a 4000px photo into a 400px card. Generate the exact dimensions each layout needs.

2. Convert to a modern format

Switching JPEG to WebP or AVIF alone typically saves 25–50% with no visible difference.

3. Set a sane quality ceiling

Quality 100 is rarely necessary. 75–85 is usually indistinguishable on photographic content and meaningfully smaller.

4. Serve responsive sources

Pair correctly-sized images with srcset so phones don't download desktop-sized files.

5. Cache processed output at the edge

Once an image is transformed, it shouldn't be recomputed on every request — cache it close to the reader.

Running all five through a single API call is exactly what pixpoo's transform endpoint is for.