Photos are almost always the heaviest part of a page. On WordPress the usual answer is a plugin such as Smush, Imagify or ShortPixel: it compresses the pictures, makes WebP copies and, past a monthly quota, asks for a subscription. On Cleitext there is nothing to install: image optimization is part of the system, on every site, for free.
What happens when you upload a photo
- Cleitext makes copies in the two modern formats, WebP and AVIF, much lighter than JPEG and PNG at the same quality
- Each copy comes in up to four sizes, from a small preview to full width, and a small picture is never blown up
- Photos taken with the phone sideways are turned the right way
- It all happens in the background: the upload answers at once, and the same file uploaded twice is kept only once
Every visitor gets the lightest picture
In the page, Cleitext offers the browser all the copies at once: AVIF first, then WebP, then the original for very old browsers. The browser takes the best format it knows, in the size that fits the screen. A phone downloads a photo a few hundred pixels wide, not the five-megabyte original.
- Pictures further down the page load only when the visitor gets near them
- The first picture of the page loads with priority, so what you see first appears sooner
- Width and height are always declared, so the text does not jump while photos load
- The focal point you choose in the media library stays in view when the theme crops a photo
These are the things Google measures in its Core Web Vitals, the page speed signals that count for search.
Coming from WordPress?
When you move a site with the WordPress importer, its photos go through the same process: they keep their addresses, and they get their WebP and AVIF copies too. So you can leave the image plugin behind with the old site, with one subscription less.
A tip that still helps: upload photos that are not much bigger than they need to be. A 2000-pixel picture is plenty for any screen. Visitors always get the light copies, but a smaller original takes less space on the server and in backups. And as every part of Cleitext, the media library is tested at every change.
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