Those Before and After Photos are Killing Your Site
Someone searches for a plumber while standing in a puddle in their kitchen. They click your link. Nothing happens. A white screen hangs there for six seconds while their phone tries to download fifteen massive, uncompressed photos of a bathroom reno you did last year. They hit the back button and call the next guy.
You just lost a two grand job because your website’s too heavy.
I see this every week. A builder or a sparky finishes a rough-in, pulls out their phone, takes a great shot, and dumps it straight onto their gallery. Those phones take massive 5MB photos now. You put ten of those on a single page, and you’re asking a customer’s phone to download 50 megabytes of data just to see your phone number. Down in industrial pockets like Wacol, the 4G network is patchy on a good day. It’s not going to load.
Your portfolio is meant to show off your work. Right now, it’s a roadblock. You view websites as machinery, not art.
Here’s the fix. It’s not complicated.
Step one is stopping the bleed. Stop uploading raw files directly from your camera roll. Before a photo goes near your site, it needs compression. You want those individual images under 200 kilobytes. You can use free web tools to bulk compress a whole batch in three minutes. If you’re running a standard setup, install a plugin to handle it in the back end automatically.
Step two is the format. Turn those heavy JPEGs and PNGs into WebP files. It’s a modern format built specifically for browsers. The customer sees the exact same quality, but the file weighs a fraction of the size.
Step three is lazy loading. This is non-negotiable. This means your website only loads the images the customer is actually looking at on their screen. If you have twenty photos buried at the bottom of the page, the site shouldn’t waste time loading them until the user actually scrolls down to look at them.
We rebuilt a site for a commercial roofer out in Darra last month. He had a hundred photos on his past projects page. The site was basically broken on mobile. We pulled all the images down, ran them through a batch compressor, converted the lot to WebP, and set up lazy loading.
The page went from a 12-second load time to under two seconds. Their phone started ringing differently – higher-quality calls, fewer tyre-kickers.
Nobody cares about the high-resolution grain of the timber you used. They care about invoices sent. They care that you look competent. They care that your site actually works when they need a quote.
Fix your galleries, or let the guy down the road take your leads.
