200KB is the budget where you stop making compromises. It is comfortable enough that a full-size web photograph still looks genuinely good, and small enough that page speed is never the problem. Target preset below.
Target preset to 200 KB — a comfortable budget for web-quality photographs.
Tighter limits like 50KB or 100KB usually exist because a form demands them. 200KB is different — it is a number you choose, and it is the one most worth choosing.
At 200KB a 1920-pixel-wide photograph still looks excellent on a retina display. It loads in well under a second on a normal mobile connection. And a page carrying ten of them totals 2MB of imagery, which is a perfectly healthy content page rather than a slow one.
If nobody has given you a number to hit, this is the number.
100KB halves the weight again and is the right call when a form demands it or when you have a lot of images on one page. On detailed photographs at full width the difference starts to be visible if you look for it.
50KB requires resizing to look good and is really a constraint rather than a choice.
Going above 200KB rarely pays. The visible improvement from 200KB to 500KB is small; the cost in load time is not.
Two adjustments make a 200KB image noticeably better without changing the number.
Resize to what is displayed. If the image appears in a 1200px column, serving it at 1200px rather than 4000px means the whole 200KB is spent on pixels people actually see.
Use WebP. Switch the format above and the same 200KB buys roughly 30% more quality, because the codec is simply more efficient. For anything staying on your own site there is no reason not to.
It is arguably the best general-purpose target. A 1920px photograph at 200KB still looks excellent on a high-density screen while loading in well under a second on mobile.
Set the target to 200KB — already preset here — and press Compress. The result lands at or just under the limit, never over, at the highest quality that fits.
Use 100KB when a form requires it or when a page carries many images. Use 200KB when image quality matters and you are choosing the number yourself.
Yes, two ways: resize the image to the dimensions it will actually be displayed at, and switch the output format to WebP, which buys roughly 30% more quality for the same file size.