Freeform Spaces had a page on their website that weighed 76 megabytes. Not the whole site. One page.
It was the team page, which is one of the two or three pages a serious prospect always visits before they get in touch. It finished at 1.84 MB.
This is the part worth understanding, because it is why the problem survived for years.
On the office wifi, on a desktop, with every image already sitting in the browser cache, the page loaded fine. The people who could have reported the problem were the least likely to experience it.
On a phone, on mobile data, the same page is a 76 megabyte download that a visitor abandons long before the team photos appear. There is no error message. There is no bounce report that says “this page was too heavy”. There is only a stream of people who looked at your team, saw nothing load, and went somewhere else.
That is the shape of most conversion problems I get called in for, and it is one of the reasons a site with traffic produces no enquiries. Not a broken thing that announces itself. A working thing that quietly fails for the people you most want to reach.
Three ordinary decisions, each defensible on its own, multiplied together.
One team member is a 2.3 MB mistake. A full team page is a 76 MB one.
Convert the photographs to WebP at high quality and identical dimensions, so nothing visibly changes. Point the theme at the correctly sized crop instead of the original. Add native lazy loading so images below the fold wait their turn.
| Page | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Team page total weight | 76 MB | 1.84 MB |
| Typical headshot | 2.3 MB PNG | WebP, same dimensions |
| Images served at correct crop | No | Yes |
| Below-fold images deferred | No | Yes |
Two details that are worth knowing if you attempt this yourself.
WebP is not automatically smaller. Converting an already-optimised JPEG can produce a larger file. The conversion has to compare the two and keep the winner, otherwise you spend a day making a site heavier.
The old files stay on the server. Old posts, popups and emails contain hardcoded links to the original filenames. Deleting the originals to reclaim disk space breaks images in places nobody thinks to check. Disk is cheaper than that.
The site was also moved to new hosting during this work, and the next-heaviest page is around 6.5 MB, so there is more available if it is wanted. The team page was the one that mattered because of who visits it and when.
No new content was written. No new pages were built. Nothing was redesigned, which is worth sitting with if you are currently weighing up whether to rebuild your site. The marketing decision was to work out which page carried the most commercial weight and then remove what was standing between it and the visitor.
Most founder-led businesses I speak to assume improving their marketing means producing more of it. Sometimes the highest-value thing available is making what you already have reach the people it was built for.
If you want to check your own site, open the page you most want a prospective client to see, on your phone, on mobile data, with the wifi turned off. That test costs nothing and tells you more than most analytics dashboards. Then walk the paths customers never tell you are broken.
Most founder-led businesses are not short of marketing activity. They are short of a decision about what matters. The Founder-Led Marketing Scorecard takes about three minutes and tells you which of seven areas is holding the rest back.
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