Editing your site
Pictures, and a site that feels slow
Almost every slow website is slow for one reason: enormous photographs. A picture straight out of a modern phone can be 6 MB, and eight of them on a page is a page that takes half a minute on a phone signal.
The editor handles most of this for you. What is left is worth knowing.
What you can use
PNG, JPG, WebP and GIF. You can upload a file, or paste the web address of a picture that is already online.
What the editor does for you
When you upload a photograph, before it ever leaves your computer, the editor:
- shrinks it so its longest side is at most 2000 pixels — bigger than any screen will use;
- re-saves it as WebP, a format that is usually half the size at the same quality.
So a 6 MB phone photograph typically arrives as a few hundred kilobytes and looks identical. You do not need to resize anything first.
GIFs are the exception — they are uploaded exactly as they are, so the animation survives.
The limits
| Each picture, after the editor shrinks it | 4 MB |
| Pictures per site | 200 |
| Everything on the site together | 1 GB |
If an upload is refused for size, it is almost always an image the editor could not shrink — a huge GIF, or a file that is not really the format its name claims.
Uploading the same picture twice costs nothing extra: we store one copy. Pictures from our own library cost nothing against your storage at all.
Cropping does not damage the original
When you crop or reframe a picture in the editor, the original file is untouched — we store the framing, not a new copy. Change your mind as often as you like; nothing is thrown away and nothing is re-compressed.
If the site still feels slow
Press Publish and read the Before you publish list. It flags "Slow to load" on any page that is heavier than about 1.5 MB, and tells you roughly how long that page will take on a slow connection.
The usual fixes, in order of how much they help:
- Fewer, smaller pictures above the fold. The first screenful is what people judge.
- Do not use a photograph as a page background when a colour would do.
- Embed video rather than hosting it. YouTube and Vimeo have machinery for this that a static host should not pretend to have.
If a picture does not show up at all
- If you pasted a web address, open that address in a new tab. If it does not load there, it will not load on your site — some sites block their pictures being used elsewhere.
- If you deleted the picture from your library, put it back or choose another.
- If it shows in the editor but not on the live site, you have not published since you added it.
Describe your pictures
A picture's description is read aloud to blind visitors, shown when the picture fails to load, and read by search engines. Fill it in beside the picture in the right-hand column.
The publish check finds the ones you have missed and groups them under "Photos nobody has described", naming the page each is on — click a line and the editor selects that picture for you. One short sentence each — "Our shopfront on a sunny morning" — is enough.
The other half of a fast page is not yours to worry about: why pages open quickly wherever your reader is.