Your galleries are why your site is slow.

A typical gallery page uploads forty full resolution exports straight from Lightroom, each two to five megabytes, served at their original dimensions and scaled down in the browser. On a good connection it is slow. On a phone at a venue with two bars of signal, it is unusable.

This costs you twice. Google uses page experience signals in ranking, so slow gallery pages underperform. And the visitor who waits eight seconds mostly does not wait: they go back to the results page and click the next photographer.

What we do to fix it

• Correct dimensions: serve images at the size they are actually displayed, with responsive variants for phone, tablet and desktop rather than one huge file for everyone
• Modern formats: WebP or AVIF with fallbacks, which typically cuts file size by half or more at visually identical quality
• Sensible compression: quality settings tuned per image type, tested on real screens, because photographers rightly refuse to ship visible artefacts
• Lazy loading, done properly: images below the fold load on demand, while the hero image loads eagerly with high priority so the page feels instant
• Explicit dimensions: width and height attributes so the layout does not jump as images arrive, which is both a ranking signal and a genuine irritation to visitors
• Descriptive filenames: hampton-manor-winter-wedding.jpg rather than DSC_4471.jpg, because the filename is a real, if minor, ranking signal
• Alt text that is actually useful: written for someone using a screen reader first, which is also what search engines and AI systems parse best
• Gallery length discipline: sixty images on one page rarely serves anyone. We split, paginate or lazy load in batches

Image SEO is also traffic in its own right

Google Images and the image results inside AI answers are a genuine discovery channel for photographers, and one almost nobody optimises for. Correct filenames, alt text, captions, structured data and surrounding context all make your work findable as images rather than only as pages.

The honest constraint

How far we can take this depends on your platform. WordPress gives the most control. Squarespace and Showit hand you less, and we work within what they allow rather than pretending otherwise. Even on the most locked down platform, correct sizing before upload and disciplined gallery length usually produce most of the available gain.