Mobile Page Speed: Why Raw Photos Kill Conversions
I audited a landscaping business in Forest Lake yesterday. The owner was complaining that his Google Ads were burning cash with zero calls. I pulled up his site on 4G. It took 14 seconds to load. Why? Because he had uploaded twenty raw photos of a retaining wall directly from his iPhone. Each photo was 5MB. That is not a website; that is a data storage facility. If your customer is trying to load your site while standing in a Bunnings car park, they will not wait 14 seconds. They will bounce.
A website that fails to load in under 3 seconds is not an asset. It is a liability that actively repels revenue.
The Diagnosis
We view your website as a pipe. Bandwidth is the water pressure. If you shove a brick (a 5MB image) into the pipe, the water stops flowing. This is a mechanical failure, not a design choice. Here is what happens in the back end:
-
The Bandwidth Hog: Modern phones take massive, high-resolution photos intended for print. Browsers have to download that entire file just to display a thumbnail.
-
The Mobile Tax: 60% of your traffic is mobile. On a patchy 4G connection in Ipswich, a 50MB homepage will simply time out.
-
Google Penalty: Google’s Core Web Vitals measure “Largest Contentful Paint” (LCP). If your LCP is slow, Google removes you from the Map Pack. You become invisible.
The Fix
You do not need a new design. You need compression. We treat image optimisation like trimming fat off a steak. It makes the product leaner and better. Follow this protocol:
-
Resize Dimensions: Your website does not need 4000px wide images. Resize them to a maximum of 1920px for banners and 800px for blog posts.
-
Convert to WebP: JPEGs and PNGs are outdated for web use. WebP is a modern file format that provides superior compression without losing quality.
-
The 100kb Rule: No single image on your site should exceed 100kb. If it does, compress it again.
-
Lazy Loading: Configure the site to only load images as the user scrolls down. This prioritises the “First Contentful Paint” and gets the phone number in front of the customer instantly.
We stripped the heavy images off that Forest Lake landscaper’s site and replaced them with optimised WebP versions. The total page size dropped from 85MB to 2MB. The load time went from 14 seconds to 1.1 seconds.
He didn’t change his ad spend, but his phone started ringing again. Speed is not a luxury feature. It is the foundation of digital infrastructure. If you are slow, you are closed.
