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Photos and video on mobile
You spent real money getting your work photographed. Your website has done something to those files since, nobody chose what, and it shows on a phone.
About 12 minutes
The short version
Somebody has found you, decided you might be the right business, and gone looking for proof. On a service website the proof is almost always a photograph. The finished bathroom. The retaining wall. The roof from the drone. The before and the after, side by side. Those photos are doing more of the selling than any paragraph on the page, and you already know it, because you paid somebody to take them.
Then somebody opens the page on a phone, on mobile data, standing in a hallway or sitting in a ute. And for a second, or three, or eight, there is nothing there. A grey box where the job should be. A layout that jumps as the pictures land one at a time. A video with a circle going round in the middle of it.
They are not judging your work in that moment, because they cannot see it yet. They are judging the wait. And the wait is almost always the file: how big it is, what shape it is, and what got done to it somewhere between your camera and their screen.
A phone has no idea the photo is beautiful. It only knows it is eight megabytes.
None of this is an argument for shooting smaller. Your photographer should hand you the biggest files their camera makes, and the 4K video off your phone should stay exactly as it is on a drive somewhere, because you will want it for print, for signage, and for whatever you decide to do with it in three years.
What you keep
The master copy
The full-size photograph and the original video, filed away, untouched. Nobody outside your business ever opens these.
What you publish
The customer copy
The same job, resized and saved for a phone on mobile data, and made once, the day it goes on the website.
Three things pull against each other here: how good it looks, how big the file is, and how quickly it arrives. The job is not to make the file as small as it will go, and it is not to protect the original at all costs. It is to find the point where the work still looks like your work and nobody is waiting for it.
If your site was built on Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy or WordPress, a fair bit of what follows is already happening without you. They resize what you upload. They hand a phone a smaller version than they hand a laptop. Most of them convert to a modern format on the way through. That is real, it is worth having, and it is why plenty of sites are not nearly as slow as they ought to be given what was uploaded to them.
What none of them do is tell you what they decided. You cannot see what came out the other end, what it weighs, where it got cropped, or what happened to the video. The settings that would let you choose are buried, or vague, or not there at all. So the most important pictures on your website end up looking however somebody else's default decided they should look.
The question is not whether anything was done to your photos. Something was. It is whether anybody has ever looked at what.
None of which means you should hand the builder the biggest file you own and hope. What it produces depends entirely on what it was given, and the further it has to drag a photograph from six thousand pixels down to something a phone can use, the more of the decision you have handed to it. Give it something close to the right size already and what comes out is close to what you would have picked yourself.
It is also why nobody ever catches this. The photo looks superb on the laptop it was uploaded from, over the wi-fi it was uploaded on, in a browser that has had it sitting in memory since thirty seconds ago. The customer has none of those advantages. So there are two things worth doing before a photograph goes anywhere near the website, whoever built it, and neither of them needs a developer.
A modern camera gives you a photograph six thousand pixels across. A phone shows it in a column a few hundred pixels wide. Nobody ever sees the difference. They just wait for it. Most photos on a website have no reason to be wider than about sixteen hundred pixels, and a good many of them are fine at half that.
WebP is a newer way of saving a picture, which every phone and browser worth worrying about has understood for years. Same photograph, usually a good deal smaller than the JPEG it started as. It is the closest thing to a free win in here, and it takes about a minute.
Squoosh does it in a browser window, for nothing, without an account. Drag the photo in, choose WebP, watch the two halves of the screen to see whether you can tell the difference, and download it. TinyPNG is simpler again if you would rather not think about the settings at all. Which one you use matters far less than whether anybody does it.
There is a trap on the other side of this. Somebody discovers that smaller files load faster, so everything gets squeezed as hard as it will go, and now the eight megabyte photograph is two hundred kilobytes and the render looks like it was taken through a screen door.
That is not the goal either, because the photo is still there to sell the work. A builder's finished renovation has to look impressive. A landscaper's garden has to look lush. A painter's cut-in has to look sharp enough to be worth paying for. Find the point where the file is much smaller and the picture is not visibly worse, and check that on a phone rather than on the big monitor it was compressed on.
If there is a single expensive habit in this piece, it is this one. You take a genuinely good video of a job. It comes off the phone at three hundred megabytes. It goes on the website, because that is the file you have.
And now you own a beautiful video that almost nobody watches. It buffers. Or it eats somebody's data while they are standing in a car park. Or the customer has read the page, decided, and gone, all before the first frame turned up.
HandBrake is free, it runs on your own computer, and it exists to do exactly this. You open the big original, choose one of the presets it comes with rather than going anywhere near the technical settings, and it writes you a much smaller copy. An MP4 at 1080p is a sensible thing to aim at for a service business, and on most videos that alone is the difference between three hundred megabytes and something a phone can start playing almost immediately.
The original never moves. It stays on the drive, at full size, for anything else you ever want to do with it. The small one goes on the website, and it is the only version a customer ever meets.
The other half of this is a video that starts the moment somebody lands. On a big screen with a fast connection it can look impressive. On a phone it means the heaviest thing on the page begins downloading before the visitor has shown the slightest interest in watching it, and it is competing for the connection with the photos they actually came to see.
A poster image is the still picture that sits on the video before anybody presses play, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than letting the software grab whatever the first frame happened to be. Show the finished job there and people will press play, because they can see what they are about to get. Show a blurred half-second of somebody walking past a skip bin and they will not.
Sometimes the honest answer is that three good photographs do everything the video was doing, and they turn up instantly. A video earns its place when it shows something a photo genuinely cannot: the scale of a site, the finish catching the light as you walk past it, you talking to the camera so somebody can decide whether they want you in their house. If it is on the page because the drone footage was expensive, that is not the customer's problem to carry.
There is a design decision hiding inside all of this, and it costs nothing at all. Forty photos came back from the job. That does not mean the customer needs to scroll through forty, and every one of them is another file the phone has to fetch before the page settles down.
Somebody deciding whether to ring you is not browsing an album. They are running a very short check, and it is nearly always the same one: does this business do work I would be happy with. The strongest photo you own answers that on its own, and the other thirty-nine are there for the small number of people who want to keep looking.
Your customer is holding a phone in one hand, vertically, and a wide landscape photograph on that screen becomes a thin strip across the middle. Worse, on a lot of websites it does not become a strip: it gets cropped to fit, and the crop takes the middle out of the shot, which on a photo of a bathroom is the bathroom.
That does not mean everything has to be shot upright. It means the shape is a decision rather than whatever the camera happened to produce. A portrait or four-by-five crop uses far more of a phone screen than a wide landscape does, and short vertical clips work particularly well when the video was filmed for a phone in the first place.
The question is not what shape the camera gave you. It is what this looks like in one hand, held upright, by somebody who has not seen the job.
About ten minutes, on your phone, with wi-fi off. Nothing here is scored and there is nothing to send anybody. It is nine things to go and look at, and most people find the answer to their own question in the first three.
If that was useful, the same idea applied to a whole website is the sixteen-check cheatsheet. That one does keep a count, because it is a tool rather than a piece of writing.
All of this comes down to one instruction.
Send the copy, not the master.Plenty of websites are fine here. If the photos arrived before you had time to wonder about them, the crop still showed the work, and nothing started playing at you, then your images are not the reason the phone is quiet, and compressing them further will not make it ring.
Do not let anybody sell you a rebuild on the strength of it, and that includes me. Go and look further back instead: whether people are finding you at all, whether the page they land on says the thing they came to check, and whether the enquiry form asks for eleven things when it could ask for three.
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