Before You Hit Upload in WordPress: Weigh, Compress and Re-Weigh Your Phone Photos (29 MB → 7 MB)
The first time I ran a small café site through PageSpeed Insights, the photos did most of the damage. The theme was fine and the plugins were fine. The problem was five pictures in one gallery block, dragged into the WordPress media library straight from the owner's phone. Together they weighed more than the rest of the site combined. Since then I go through the same short checklist before any phone photo gets near the Upload button: weigh the page, compress the batch in the browser, check the files, zoom in on one, then weigh the page again. Below is that checklist with a real run, five full-size phone photos that went from 29.1 MB to 7.1 MB . I also cover two things WordPress does with big images that most people don't expect. The compressor I use is PixSip , which I make, so keep that in mind as you read. The five photos I tested with To keep this honest I didn't use web-ready sample images. These are five unedited phone photos from Wikimedia Commons, all released as CC...