Hi there! Seeking strategy for 2025 on photos and page speed. Last year we converted photos to .webp when upgrading to our Renaissance site and tried to keep all under 400kb. Is this still a good practice in 2025 - we sometimes have challenges for photos when resizing and converting to .webp in that we lose too much of the quality of the photos and they come out fuzzy. Thanks!
Hi @JenDurben! WebP files are still highly recommended as it reduces file sizes significantly compared to JPEGs & PNGs.
Are your original image sizes quite large? You’re correct in reducing it’s size before exporting and as a WebP. But keep in mind that if you reduce it too much, it will noticeably affect the quality of your image (go slightly larger in size if it’s too pixelated). You’ll have to play around with the sizing and WebP compression quality til you have a good amount of sharpness with your exported image.
If you’re using an editing app like Photoshop, you can resize by going to Image > Image Size, and when exporting it as a WebP try to keep the compression quality to about 80-100%.
If you don’t use Photoshop or editing apps, there are a lot of handy image converters online. This one’s pretty cool and offers a lot of setting options - https://squoosh.app/
Again, play around and test it a few times with different sizes and the amount of compression. Each image will be different depending on it’s data.
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Thanks Elianna, we’ve definitely played around quite a bit with finding the sweet spot for sizing. Would you say between 300kb - 400kb is still best practice for max file size?
Yes, I would try stick to 300-400kb max for best practice 
Ideal file sizes can range from 100-500kb. There may be special cases (eg. Hero images which are larger) that might export slightly above. Just keep in mind if you get close to, or above 1mb it can lead to slower loading.
Hey @playingmarkets! The info above is best practice for a single image
@Elianna is a spammer - i’ll whack them
Yeah, webp is still the way to go, but I feel you on the quality struggle. For listing photos though, I’ll sometimes let key images go up to 600kb.
Like Elianna said, there are plenty of free online tools to help you with compression. I would add using a good CDN that can auto-resize for different devices. Plus, lazy loading non-critical images have been helpful for us. Always check if your source image is high-res before compressing.
For overall page speed, cache plugins like wprocket works best. If you use there premium plan, try their “preloading” feature - really helps!
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