Meta: Debugging slow images? Use this guide to trace storage delays, cache misses, and heavy transformations.
When users complain that a page "feels slow," the first thing engineers usually check is images. It’s easy to assume that the fix is simply using the appropriate format, such as WebP over JPEG or AVIF over WebP. But real-world performance issues are rarely that simple.
More often than not, the actual issue isn't even the format. The slowdown could be hiding in:
A proxy layer resizing images in real time
A CDN that's not caching as expected
