Images are the heaviest thing on almost every web page — typically half the total page weight — and they're the first place to look when a site feels slow. The stakes are concrete in 2026: Google's Core Web Vitals punish slow-loading hero images, and every extra second of load time measurably cuts conversions. Yet most oversized images aren't a technical problem; they're a workflow problem. Someone uploaded a 4000-pixel photo straight from a phone into a 800-pixel slot.
The fix is a simple three-step pipeline: size the image for where it will actually display, compress it to a sensible file size, and serve it in the right format. Here's the full workflow, with real size targets, using free browser tools that need no sign-up and never watermark your files.
