
If someone is trying to visit your site with one or two bars of cell phone service, they should still be able to see your site without waiting 30 seconds to start seeing movement. The slower a page is to load, the more it will affect your search ranking. Google has set "fast-loading pages" and several load-time metrics in the Core Web Vitals as crucial search ranking factors. This phenomenon is where Google's policies come in. It's no wonder that images can slow down websites by multiple orders of magnitude. A single photo can be several times larger than an entire webpage, and a webpage can have many pictures on it. A website, even a fully-featured website with a ton of content, isn't going to be more than a couple of megabytes. The average file size for images is getting larger, but they're still only 2-3 megabytes on average in 2022.

Not just in dimensions images are large in file size. What does all of this have to do with images? The internet is for everyone, which means people using slow, spotty connections, people browsing via satellite internet, etc. Remember, the internet isn't just for the people with access to gigabit fiber in the heart of Silicon Valley. Did you know that nearly 25% of households don't even have internet access or that millions still use dial-up service? And while high-speed internet is swiftly growing in availability, it's still not everywhere. Over 50% of modern web browsing is handled on mobile devices.

A typical smartphone can take pictures that are frankly immense, especially when you consider that only 10-20 years ago, an image the size of a postage stamp would take several minutes to download.Įasy access to large images, easy viewing on large computer screens, and easy access to high-speed internet for many of us mean that we might not think of pictures as having nearly the impact they do.īut then you drive out to a rural area and try to use your smartphone via LTE service to browse a website, and you watch images time out when loading, see websites devoid of content because the pictures didn't load in, and you realize. In particular, images can get very, very large. Every website needs them, whether for product pages or blog posts, but they're easy to do wrong.
