An Email I Will Never Forget
The client was a local restaurant group preparing for a grand opening. I built something I was genuinely proud of: clean design, beautiful photography, smooth navigation on every screen size. I delivered on time and under budget. Then two days after launch, a Slack message arrived saying the site felt slow. I dismissed it. All websites feel slow on mobile sometimes, I told myself. I moved on to my next project without giving it another thought.
The email came Tuesday morning. It was polite but direct. Their customers were complaining. A Google PageSpeed audit showed a score of 12 on mobile. The agency they had contacted quoted a 48-hour turnaround. They wanted to know what I could do. I felt a cold weight settle in my chest as I read it three times, looking for some detail I might have misunderstood.
A Google PageSpeed score of 12 on mobile is catastrophic for any business. Research consistently shows that a 1-second delay in load time reduces conversions by up to 7%. At 14 seconds, most mobile visitors had already hit the back button before the page even finished rendering.
What I Had Completely Ignored
I opened the browser inspector and immediately felt my stomach drop further. The hero image was a gorgeous 4K photograph the client had emailed me. I had uploaded it exactly as received: a 6.2MB JPEG file. The gallery section had twelve more images at an average of 3MB each. Total page weight was over 40MB. On fast WiFi the site loaded in around 6 seconds. On a typical mobile data connection, it was taking over 14 seconds before anything interactive appeared.
I had spent three days perfecting CSS animations and micro-interactions. I had installed a caching plugin, optimized fonts, and invested in a premium hosting plan. But I had not spent even five minutes thinking about the images. It was like soundproofing a concert hall and forgetting to put a roof on it. The images alone were responsible for roughly 94% of the total page weight, and I had handed them to the server completely raw.
How I Fixed It in Under an Hour
I opened ImageBlink and started on the hero image immediately. Running it through the JPEG compressor brought it from 6.2MB down to 380KB. Then I converted it to WebP using the JPEG to WebP converter, which shaved it down further to 210KB with no visible quality difference at the display size the site was using.
For the gallery images, I used the image resizer first, bringing each one down to its actual display dimensions before compressing. The gallery container was 800 pixels wide, but I had been serving 4000-pixel images. After resizing and compressing every image in the gallery, the total page weight dropped from 40MB to under 2.8MB.
I also opened each image in the EXIF viewer and stripped all the embedded camera metadata before re-uploading. GPS coordinates, timestamps, camera model strings: all of it was adding bytes to every file with zero benefit to any visitor. After the full optimization pass, the PageSpeed score jumped from 12 to 76 on mobile. I sent the re-uploaded files within 45 minutes of opening that email.
The Three-Step Checklist I Now Run on Every Project
That experience reshaped how I deliver every project. Before any image touches a website now, it goes through three non-negotiable steps. First, resize to the actual display dimensions. Second, compress to under 200KB for standard images. Third, convert to WebP for all JPEG and PNG files shown in a browser. These three steps take about five minutes per project and have kept me from ever receiving that kind of email again.
The client stayed. They sent me three referrals over the following twelve months. But I still think about that Tuesday email whenever I am tempted to skip the optimization step on a new build. A 6MB image is not just a slow page. In freelancing, it is a reputation risk that no portfolio piece can cover up, and speed is one of the easiest problems to prevent if you make it part of your process from the start.