Images are the single biggest performance lever on almost every website. They average over 1MB of every 2MB page — and cutting them down is the fastest way to improve Core Web Vitals and SEO rankings.
I've spent the past few months obsessing over image compression (I built CompressFast to scratch my own itch). Here's the complete, ordered checklist I use on every project.
1. Resize first — it's the single biggest win
A 6000×4000 photo served to a 1200px-wide card is pure waste. Before anything else, resize to the largest size your layout actually displays.
Resizing alone cut my test image from 4.7MB to 1.1MB — a 77% reduction with zero quality change.
