Showit automatically optimizes your images that are used on pages within Showit. Your blog however manages images separately and if you include many images in a post, it's important to optimize those images before adding them to the post.
What Determines the Load Time for a Page?
There are many factors that can affect a web page's load time such as images, embed code, text content, and animations. Text content usually has the least impact on load times and so that likely would not cause speed issues. Embed codes can slow down the overall load time of your web page but because they are dependent on third-party developers and external systems managed outside of Showit. Images are easily the biggest culprit for affecting load times for photographers by nature of the industry. However, by following some simple tips and optimizing the images you use on your web page you can dramatically improve its performance and response time.
One exaggerated example of how images affect can load times would be by taking a look at an example blog post. Say in this blog post we added 100 images that are all roughly 2mb each. This means the blog post's web page has to load in 200mb of data just on images. The average user's internet speed runs between 18-19mb/s which means this example post would take the user 4-5 seconds (in addition to any other page content) to load.
On a smaller scale example, if you had only say 12 images on your home page at about 1.5mb each, it would take a good full second for just those images to load. This isn't too extreme but if you double the image number the load time also gets doubled and so on. This is why pages with image galleries tend to load slower than other pages.
How Can I Optimize My Images?
While it's totally fine to have larger image files, it's all about moderation. The more files you may have on a given page, the more you will want to optimize image file sizes in order to maintain good load times.
Photographer SEO experts recommend keeping image files at a max of 500kbs with an ideal goal of 300kbs. This not only improves your web page load speeds but also with the increased speeds it promotes your page as being a quality web page for search engines like Google.
This article provides additional info on how to optimize and compress your images with a video tutorial.