Don’t let big images kill your SEO

One simple tip to speed up your site

Author

Stacey Nicholls
May 14, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Images make the internet fun.

But a common SEO issue is that the images aren’t optimized, which can slow down a website and hurt its visibility in search engines.

You may not even notice the slow load time unless you’re on sketchy Wi-Fi. But your visitors? They might get impatient and click away before the page finishes loading, which means you’ve lost a chance for a sale.

Worse, search engines track when users bounce quickly and that can lower your site’s ranking for future searches. So if your site isn’t loading quickly, it’s not being seen. And if it’s not being seen, you’re missing out on sales.

The fix?

Optimize your images.

Here are some general guidelines:

  • Keep your images under 500kb

  • For non-full-width images, resize to 1500px on the longest edge

  • For full-width images, aim for 2000–2500px

  • Use JPGs unless the image needs a transparent background

  • PNGs are fine for transparency, but they’re larger so compress as much as you can

It might sound technical, but one of my favorite tools, Resize Pixel, makes it simple.
(Not an affiliate link, just a fan.)

Use the buttons on the left to resize, compress, or convert your image. I usually start with Resize and Compress, then Download once I’m happy with the file size. You can see a preview of the new file size on the bottom left.

It walks you through resizing and compressing your image in a few clicks. Just make sure your image still looks good before you upload it to your site. It’s better to go slightly larger than end up with something pixelated and looking terrible.

At the end of the day, your website should be optimized for the humans using it, not just the robots crawling it.

Quick Tip:

Build image optimization into your content workflow. For example, if you’re writing a blog post with a few photos, resize and compress the images before you upload them to your website. It saves time later, keeps your site running fast, and helps your content show up in search.

Talk soon!
Stacey

P.S.
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