Compression has a bad reputation. People hear "compress" and picture a photo turned into mush.

But here's the thing. Most images are carrying dead weight: metadata, oversized dimensions, and quality headroom nobody can see. Trimming that weight is compression too, and it's invisible.

Step one: shrink the dimensions

A phone photo is often 4000 pixels wide. Your blog displays it at 800. Those extra 3200 pixels are just bytes doing nothing.

Resize the image to the size it will actually be shown at. This one step usually cuts the file size more than any quality slider ever will. A 4000-pixel photo becomes a 800-pixel photo, and the file drops from 5 MB to 400 KB before you've touched quality at all.

Step two: pick the right format

Photos go to JPG or WebP. Graphics and logos stay PNG. This isn't compression exactly, but the wrong format is the single biggest reason files are bloated.

I see PNG screenshots on websites constantly. Converting them to JPG (when there's no transparency) often cuts 80 percent of the weight. No quality slider involved.

Step three: touch the quality slider last

Now, and only now, play with quality. For JPG, 80 percent is the sweet spot for the web. I've tested this more times than I can count: 100 percent versus 80 percent looks identical on a screen. The file is half the size.

Go below 60 and you'll start seeing damage: blocky gradients, fuzzy edges. Stay above 75 and you're safe.

Practical tip: zoom to 100 percent and check faces and text after compressing. Those are the two places damage shows first. A sky can hide a lot. An eyebrow can't.

The order matters

Dimensions first, format second, quality third. Most people do it backwards: they drag the quality slider down to 40 and wonder why the photo looks awful, when resizing alone would have solved it.

Jiggle X Wiggle's free converter handles the format and quality side in a couple of clicks. Do the resizing to match your actual display size, and you've got a file that's small and still looks like itself.