Avoid Too Many Large Images

Image content is great for making a website stand out, or for easily conveying information to website visitors. However, having several large images on the same web page can significantly increase the time the web page takes to fully load and increase how much data visitors must download in order to see the web page.

Image display size

Large images will not prevent web browsers from starting to show web content; however, large images may not load completely until most of the page is loaded. Using large images can slow down how quickly web browsers will show web page content if the web browser has to scale the image to fit the screen of the device in use. For instance, an image scaled for a desktop computer will be much too large to display on a mobile device, but the mobile device’s web browser would still have to download the large image in its entirety.

Bandwidth

Downloading large images can also quickly use up a mobile visitor’s mobile data allowance or the bandwidth the mobile visitor is allowed to use.

Many WordPress hosts include plans that offer unlimited bandwidth. If your host limits your bandwidth, or you pay extra for exceeding your bandwidth limits, scaling down very large images can help reduce the overall bandwidth used by your hosting account.

For best website loading performance, use large images sparingly and serve scaled versions of large images for visitors on smaller devices.