· A 3 MB hero image gets committed, the build is green, the deploy ships, and nobody notices until the Lighthouse score falls off a cliff. Discipline is not a strategy. Put optimization in the pipeline.
· The hero image, the icons, the fonts: they're in your repo and they don't change between requests. So optimize them once, when you build, instead of paying to transform them at the edge on every page load.
· A single upload becomes five or more files, each re-encoded at WordPress's default quality and then left alone. Here are the two honest ways to shrink a media library, and what each one costs.
· A managed image CDN is the right call for a lot of teams. Here is when self-hosting actually pays, when it doesn't, and what running it really costs.
· Screenshots, logos, charts and UI aren't photographs, and the photo codecs that shrink AVIF and JPEG are the wrong tool for them. What actually works, with numbers.
· Encoding at -q 80 lands anywhere from ssimulacra2 58 to 87 depending on the image. Why a fixed quality setting ships inconsistent quality, and what to target instead.
Patu