Compress image to 1 MB

Page speed is something both readers and search engines notice, and images are usually the heaviest thing on a page. A single untouched camera photo can be 5 to 10 MB — put three of those in an article and a phone on a mobile connection stalls before the text appears.

Holding each image to around 1 MB keeps the page responsive and helps Core Web Vitals metrics like Largest Contentful Paint, while still leaving enough resolution for a full-width hero on a laptop or a high-density display. It is the size that balances looking good against loading quickly.

A megabyte is generous, so you rarely have to give up visible quality — the trick is not wasting it. Resize the image to the largest width it will actually display at first; a hero shown at 1600 pixels wide gains nothing from a 6000-pixel original except weight.

Then compress toward 1 MB, and for the web consider WebP, which typically holds the same clarity as JPG at a noticeably smaller size. Photographs, gradients and detailed scenes all survive 1 MB comfortably; the only images that suffer are ones scaled down too far before compressing.

The resize and re-encode run in your browser, so nothing about an unreleased product shot or a draft blog image is uploaded before you publish it. That keeps embargoed or client work off third-party servers, and it lets you batch every image for an article in one go without waiting on an upload. The file is handled locally and returned for download, with no account and no trace left behind.

The single biggest saving on a web image comes from resizing before you compress, not from quality alone. Decide the largest width the image will ever display at — a full-width hero is rarely shown above 2000 pixels, and an in-article image often much less — and scale to that first.

A photo trimmed to its real display width reaches 1 MB with quality to spare, while the same shot left at 6000 pixels wide has to be crushed to fit, which is where visible softness creeps in. Match the pixels to the layout and the megabyte does the rest, and if you are unsure of the width, checking the theme or template for its content column is faster than guessing.