You compressed the hero image. You dropped the JPEG quality to 70. The file went from 3 MB to 400 KB, and the page still feels slow. The reason is usually not quality at all. It is dimensions.
A phone photo is often 4000 pixels wide. Displayed in an 800 pixel wide container, it carries five times the pixels it needs, and the browser still downloads, decodes, and holds all of them. Quality squeezes the pixels you have. Resizing removes the pixels you never needed. Halving both dimensions quarters the pixel count, which is why a resize usually beats a quality tweak for file size, and why the two jobs belong in that order: resize first, then tune quality.
The second trap is aspect ratio. Set only a width and a height that do not match the photo, and something has to give. Either the image stretches, or it crops, or it letterboxes. Most quick tools pick one silently. The honest choice is to pick deliberately: fit keeps the whole photo inside the box, fill crops the edges to cover the box (right for banners and thumbnails), and stretch forces the exact box (right only when distortion does not matter). If your tool does not tell you which one it did, it guessed.
The third trap is upscaling. A 400 pixel logo stretched to 1200 pixels does not gain detail. It invents pixels and goes soft. A good resizer refuses to enlarge by default and makes you opt in.
There is also the social-size problem, which is really a lookup problem. Instagram post, story, Facebook post, LinkedIn banner, YouTube thumbnail, X post, Pinterest pin: each has its own dimensions, and nobody remembers all seven. A preset list removes the lookup and the typo.
I built a free resizer that does all of this in the browser, with no upload: exact dimensions, width-only, height-only, and percentage modes, eight social presets, fit, fill, and stretch handling, and batch processing for a whole folder of product shots. If your images are still slow after compressing, check the dimensions first. You can try it here: Free Image Resizer.
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