Photographers, designers, real estate developers, and agencies need creative websites to showcase their work. But the more images, videos, and content you add to your portfolios and site, the heavier the pages get and the slower they load.
All that content you want to highlight won’t matter when leads close your page. On 76% of mobile pages, the largest element that loads is an image. Here’s how to optimize images for your website, handle video, and make sure your hosting can keep up.
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Most modern cameras export at 6,000 pixels wide. Screens display 2,000 pixels or fewer. When you export photos, set the export size to the largest size your website will display. Don’t export it as heavy image formats like JPEG and PNG. Use WebP instead.
WebP and AVIF files are much smaller than JPEGs at the same visual quality. WordPress and most image plugins support both formats. The next step after exporting at the right size and format is compression.
Free tools like Squoosh show the original and compressed versions side by side. You can fine-tune images before they get muddy. After compressing, ensure that the images are responsive. A full-sized screen gets a full-size image. Smaller screens get an 800-pixel version.
You don’t need to load all your content at the same time. Show your audience content that they’re interacting with first. That’s a job for lazy loading. It delays loading images below the first screen until visitors scroll down.
Never lazy-load the first large image on the page. That first image sets a precedent for how fast the page feels. Delaying it makes your site look slow. It’s also important to set a width and height for every image. The browser can then reserve space for each photo.
Don’t stream videos on your creative websites. Upload the videos to platforms like YouTube and embed them on your site instead. Even a minute of 4K footage can be hundreds of megabytes.
It’s also better to lazy-load videos. Show a still poster image until someone presses play. If you want a background video, keep it short.
Content Delivery Networks (CDN) store copies of your files on servers across the world. This reduces page load times for a global audience. A visitor from LA won’t notice much of a speed difference compared to one from London. Services like Cloudflare have this in their basic plans.
Image CDNs like Cloudflare Images, Bunny, and Cloudinary also resize images and convert them to WebP or AVIF automatically, based on each visitor’s screen and browser. A CDN speeds up delivery, but every page still starts on your own server.
Shared hosting is on the cheaper side because you’re sharing the server with others. The tradeoff is that when the other sites spike in traffic, yours slow down.
A VPS gives your site its own share of CPU and memory. A VPS server company can set up a server sized for heavy media, so pages stay fast when a feature or campaign sends a wave of visitors.
When you compare the best hosting for photographers and studios, look at dedicated resources, storage space, and bandwidth limits. A VPS helps when the server is the bottleneck, but it won’t fix oversized images, so do the image work first.
After a major content revamp or update to your galleries or portfolios, make sure you run PageSpeed tests. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) should be under 2.5 seconds. According to data from the HTTP archive, only 62% of mobile pages hit the mark. That’s an opportunity for you to have a site that outperforms your competitors.
Resource-heavy creative websites mean it hosts a lot of content. But more content doesn’t mean your site should slow down. Images and videos can still load fast with the right setup. To recap, you keep your site fast by doing the following:
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