| Page weight | Usable (LCP) | Full gallery | Largest image |
|---|
How to read the result
The number that matters is time, not megabytes.
Google’s threshold for Largest Contentful Paint is 2.5 seconds on mobile. Most photography sites we audit land between five and nine. The gap is almost entirely images.
How the estimate works
Page weight is your images plus roughly 350KB for the HTML, CSS, fonts and scripts on a typical photography site. If lazy loading is on, only the first handful of images have to arrive before the page settles, which is why turning it on changes the number so much.
The optimised figure assumes two changes: exporting at twice the width the image is actually displayed at, which covers high density screens, and serving WebP instead of JPEG. File size scales roughly with pixel count, so halving the width cuts the file to about a quarter.
It is an estimate, not a measurement. For a real measurement run your busiest gallery page through Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile and look at the Largest Contentful Paint figure.
The mistake behind almost every slow photography site
Exporting at full resolution and letting the browser scale it down. A 6000 pixel wide file displayed in a 900 pixel column means the visitor downloads roughly forty times more data than they can possibly see. It is invisible on your office broadband and brutal on a phone.
What to do in what order
- Fix export dimensions first. Biggest win, costs nothing, and you control it entirely regardless of platform.
- Switch to WebP second. Another third off, at quality nobody can distinguish.
- Turn on lazy loading third, but never on the hero image.
- Shorten galleries last. Sixty images on one page rarely serves anyone.
There is a fuller walkthrough in why your photography website is slow.
Questions
Questions photographers ask us.
What file size should my images actually be?
For a gallery image displayed at around 900 pixels, aim for 100 to 200KB as WebP. For a full bleed hero, up to about 300KB. If your gallery images are measured in megabytes, that is the problem.
Will compressing my images ruin the quality?
Not at sensible settings. Judge it at the size the image is actually displayed, not zoomed to 100 percent in Photoshop. Export the same image at quality 100 and quality 80, view both on a screen at display size, and decide from there.
Does a CDN fix a slow photography site?
It helps with distance, not with weight. A CDN delivers a four megabyte image faster than your origin would, but it is still four megabytes. Fix the file sizes first, then add a CDN.
Do my Pixieset or Pic-Time client galleries count?
No. Those sit on a separate domain and are not part of your site’s performance profile. This is about the portfolio and blog galleries on your own domain, which are the pages being ranked.
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See exactly how your page looks in Google, measured in pixels rather than characters, on desktop and mobile
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