Image Optimization
Image optimization is making your pictures as small as they can be in file size while still looking right, because images are usually most of what a page has to download.
In plain English
A photo straight off a phone or a camera can be four thousand pixels wide and several megabytes. Displayed in a card eight hundred pixels wide, almost all of that is downloaded for nothing.
Optimizing means three things done together: resize it to the size it will actually be shown at, save it in a modern format like WebP, and compress it until the eye cannot tell but the file can.
Why it matters
On most WordPress sites, images are somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of the page weight. Fix them and the site is fast. Ignore them and no caching plugin will save you.
It matters most for the people you most want to keep: someone on a phone, on mobile data, halfway through their month.
How it works
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Resize before you uploadNothing on a normal site needs to be wider than about two thousand pixels.
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Convert to WebP or AVIFUsually a third to a half the size of a JPEG at the same visible quality.
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Compress what is leftA plugin can do this automatically for every new upload, and in bulk for the old ones.
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Load only what is on screenLazy loading holds back the images further down until someone scrolls toward them.
Fix the biggest image first
One oversized hero image usually outweighs thirty small ones. Open the browser’s network tab, sort by size, and start at the top.