A big thanks to our TBEX Europe 2025 Gold Sponsors, 34SP.com, for sharing these simple image optimization tips for your travel websites.
This year at TBEX, 34SP.com will host a WordPress Live Help Desk where you can get hands-on advice from their expert team. To make sure they bring the right tools and answers, they’re inviting you to take a quick survey about your WordPress and hosting challenges. Everyone who completes it will be entered into a prize draw to win a HotelGift.com voucher, perfect for your next adventure.
If you’ve ever run a speed test on your website and been slightly baffled by the results, you’re not alone. One of the most common culprits behind a slow-loading blog or website? Images.
We get it. As a travel brand, blogger, or DMO, your images are the soul of your site. A crisp shot of a sunrise in the Dolomites or a bustling street market in Venice tells a better story than a thousand words ever could.
But if those photos are weighing down your pages, readers may bounce before the story even begins.
Here’s the good news: with a few small tweaks, you can keep your visual impact while making your site feel faster, smoother, and easier for your audience to explore.
Let’s take a look.
It all starts with the upload
The biggest win you can get is also the simplest: compress your images before you upload them.
You might have a 10MB DSLR image that looks incredible on your desktop, but when it’s loading on someone’s mobile on patchy hotel Wi-Fi, it’s a very different story. (A staggering 74% of millennial travelers use their mobile to research trips, according to Brittany Ferries).
Most blog images don’t need to be more than 100–200KB. Shrinking them can make a huge difference to how fast your page loads.
There are plenty of free tools that do the job nicely. We like ImageOptim for Mac, TinyPNG also works for web-based compression.
Drag, drop, done!
Let WordPress do the hard work
If you’re using WordPress (still one of the most used CMS platforms across the whole internet), there are plugins that can help automate image optimization for you.
One of our favorites is Imsanity, which resizes large images as you upload them, so you don’t have to do it manually. You can set a max width and height, and it takes care of the rest.
And what about lazy loading? This is the clever little trick where images only load as you scroll down the page. It’s a great way to speed up your initial page load, especially if you like using lots of big, bold visuals.
Most modern WordPress setups have it enabled by default, but it’s worth double-checking. If you’re not sure, drop your host a quick line.
Use WebP (don’t worry, explanation below!)
WebP is a newer image format created by Google. It’s lighter than JPG or PNG, and it loads faster in most browsers. The good news is that you don’t have to understand the ins and outs to benefit from it.
Plenty of image optimization plugins now support WebP conversion automatically. You upload a JPG and the plugin quietly creates and serves a WebP version to users with compatible browsers. That’s most modern ones, by the way.
If you’re hosting with us at 34SP.com, we can enable WebP delivery at the server level. Just give us a shout via email, and we can enable the auto-serving of WebP images on demand for your site.
Serve the right image for the right screen
One of the most common issues we see on travel websites is oversized images being served to small screens. It’s like sending a full-size billboard to someone reading on mobile.
Your site might be sending a 2400 pixel-wide image to a phone that can only display 400 pixels. That wastes your visitors’ data and slows everything down.
Most WordPress themes are reasonably good at handling image sizes, but it’s worth testing a few key pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see if this crops up. If it does, consider regenerating your image thumbnails or tweaking your media settings to create more appropriate size variants.
Fewer photos, better pages
It’s easy to go overboard. But stuffing 40 high-resolution photos into one page or blog post is a surefire way to slow your page down. Even with optimization, there’s a limit…
A better approach?
- Pick your strongest visuals
- Use galleries or slideshows to keep layouts tidy
- Link to external albums if you have dozens of shots to share (and they add extra value to the visitor!)
Quality over quantity is a better experience for your reader and much kinder on page speed.
Got a global audience? Think about a CDN
If your readers are spread across the world, you might benefit from a Content Delivery Network (CDN). This is a network of servers that stores copies of your images closer to where your visitors are. So someone reading from New Zealand isn’t trying to load all your content from a server in London.
There are plenty of free or low-cost options, and your host can usually advise if it’s the right fit for your site. At 34SP.com, we don’t bundle in a CDN by default, because we think our customers should have the freedom to choose the right one for their needs. That said, if you want a starting point, we recommend KeyCDN.
Want to see what’s really slowing things down?
Here’s a one-minute DIY image audit you can do right now:
- Pick your most popular page
- Open it on your mobile using mobile data (not Wi-Fi)
- Count how long it takes before an image shows up
- Run the page through PageSpeed Insights
- See if image issues are flagged
If they are, try fixing just one thing from this article. Then retest. You might be surprised how big a difference small changes can make.
Coming to TBEX Europe this September?
Come find us at the 34SP.com Live Help Desk. We’ll run a free performance check on your blog and tell you the number one image-related thing you could fix to speed up your site.
No tech skills needed. No sales pitch. Just honest, helpful advice from people who understand WordPress and travel content.
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