How to optimize media for high website performance!

Media Optimization 101: Speed, Savings, and Sustainability for a Leaner Digital Footprint

Picture this: you’ve built an e-commerce website that sells handcrafted furniture. Each product page has images straight from the camera. You want to retain as much detail as you can in the visuals.

Right? But these hi-res images and videos could hog up bandwidth, slow down your website, and eventually chase away your visitors…because who wants to sit around waiting for your image to load up?

In today’s businesses, especially in e-commerce, every second delayed could be a 7% reduction in conversion rate.

What exactly is slowing down my website?

Not let’s say your product has 5 images each: this is 16 MB of just images, along with other elements of the webpage.

Now think of the entire catalogue – that’s another 5-10 products, which is going to be almost 0.5 GB of just images.

All this media adds a lot of weight to your website and might take a lot of time to load. This is why some of the best designed websites, sometimes, cannot perform.

And the culprits? All your HD images, 4K videos, and all the other “rich” media that you planned to add to your website.

Can we avoid media in websites?

Media dictates how our website communicates, engages, and converts. High-quality images and infographics grab attention instantly, simplifying complex information. A great video could engage, keep the users on the page, get more people to visit, and increase the intent to purchase.

In 2025, well-structured content with the right media is absolutely necessary. To start balancing your website’s performance with the media included, we must take a few key steps to optimize it for the web. Often times, business websites do not meet performance standards because most members in their teams do not understand technical solutions.

In this article, we take you through simple steps and things to remember, the text time you produce content for your website.

Image Optimization: Your First Line of Defense

Optimizing image in 2025 is beyond just “Save for Web” in Photoshop. There are far more powerful options for delivering images at small sizes, without losing any details.

Choose the right format for the job

Make sure your images are in modern, efficient formats to support modern browsers. Modern formats like AVIG or JPEG-4 are best for complex images, but make sure you set WebP or SVG fallbacks for the older browsers. You can also retain as many CSS-only designs as possible to keep the website light and efficient.

Apply smart compression techniques

Think of using both lossy and lossless compression methods to balance size and quality. Every purpose is different with different requirements.

Implement responsive delivery

An effective response system employs CDN Image optimization, Adaptive Serving, and Lazy Loading to ensure images are optimized according to the devices, and load only when required. These measures improve SEO, and overall user experience.

Monitor and maintain

Regularly check if your images are as small as possible, without compromising quality. It is also crucial to check if your images perform consistently across all platforms and devices.

Most of these steps can be optimized as and when the content is uploaded. These steps ensure that the images are always optimized for the best quality, compatibility, and website performance, regardless of the device or browser.

Video: The Hidden Bandwidth Drain

The video format is engaging, but someitmes you might not need a video at all. So the first step in optimizing video content is asking yourself this:

Do we need video at all?

If you had answered no, then you don’t need a video at all. But if you do, you might need to take these steps to optimize your video content.

How to optimize videos for your website in 2025?

1. Have only essential content uploaded to your website. Encode them with modern codecs like H.265 (instead of H.264) to deliver the same quality, but at half size.

Services like Cloudflare or Mux offer adaptive bitrate streaming, that serves appropriate quality levels based on connection speed. This cuts down the loading time in case of bad connectivity.

You don’t always need autoplay. It could waste significant energy and could even disturb the visitor’s experience.

Replace GIFs with better formats like HTML5 or animated WebP. GIFs take up way too many resources for what they deliver.

Monitoring and Maintenance: Keep the Weight Off

It is important to constantly update your website’s content: maybe through blogs, case studies, or any other informative content. But since there will be so many new changes in the website, it is important to audit how it performs.

- Run Google Lighthouse on key pages and user flows regularly, every couple of weeks.

- These tests could also be paired with WebPageTest analytics to understand how your website’s pages load

- It’s important to tract these metrics to understand what works with your website and what doesn’t.

Create a plan for your team that clearly outlines responsibilities and procedures. Schedule regular optimization sprints to ensure your site’s performance and environmental impact continue to improve over time.

How do you make this work?

Technical solutions only work when everyone understands their importance. Create clear media guidelines specifying maximum file sizes, preferred formats, and optimization workflows. Hold workshops to help designers and developers understand the sustainability impact of their choices.

Sometimes, the most important question is simply, “Do we really need that 4K hero video?”