2.3. Optimized Images

A 3 MB photo costs you diners

Your phone's camera exports a JPEG between 800 KB and 4 MB. Upload that file as is and a single image weighs twice as much as the entire page recommended by Lighthouse: its total weight audit requires staying below 1,600 KiB and marks in red anything above 5,000 KiB.

On 68% of mobile pages, the element defining LCP is an image. Looking after Core Web Vitals in a restaurant means looking after the header photo.

Format and file size: the exact numbers

WebP across the entire site. Google documents that lossy WebP is 25% to 34% smaller than a comparable JPEG, and lossless is 26% smaller than PNG. It's supported by 96.18% of browsers. AVIF compresses even more, but sits at 94.67%: serve it inside a picture with WebP or JPEG fallback, never on its own.

File weight targets, based on HTTP Archive measurements: cover image below 135 KB, the median of the heaviest image on a webpage; the rest of the gallery, close to the web's median image size of 12 KB. Export each photo in three widths—640, 1024, and 1600 pixels—and declare them in srcset with a src fallback. Only 42% of websites use it. If your CMS won't let you touch that code, that's a job for web design.

Two fixed rules: photos go in tags img real images, because a CSS background image never gets indexed on Google Images, and every single img takes width and height so the browser reserves the layout space before downloading. Without it, the text shifts and ruins your CLS.

Lazy loading: where to use it and where never to

Google makes it crystal clear: never lazy-load your LCP image. In a pizzeria, that image is the hero pizza—and in a landing page for your promotion, the one for the dish you're advertising—and it includes fetchpriority="high" and without loading="lazy". Everything below the fold—gallery, interior, team—uses loading="lazy", and carousel slides out of view with fetchpriority="low". High priority is only effective on one or two images; spread across ten, it cancels out.

9.5% of images responsible for LCP are lazy-loaded: it is the most expensive mistake and is fixed by deleting an attribute.

The metrics in effect in 2026 are three, at the 75th percentile and separated by mobile and desktop: LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds, and CLS of 0.1. If what you are reading still mentions FID, it expired on March 12, 2024.

Filename and alt text

IMG_20260814_193422.jpg tells people nothing. pizza-margarita-horno-de-lena-queretaro.webp yes. Google requires short, descriptive names; its own example contrasts my-new-black-kitten.jpg against IMG00023.JPG.

Alt text describes the photo; it doesn't repeat the keyword. Good: “Margherita pizza coming out of the wood-fired oven at the Downtown branch counter.” Bad: “queretaro pizzeria pizza queretaro best pizza.” The same criteria applies as in 2.2 Meta descriptions: you write for a human. Only 55% of images on the web have filled-out alt text; covering your twenty photos takes half an hour and is one of the tasks with SEO yield the highest return per hour.

Tag the primary photo with og:image so it displays completely when someone shares your menu via WhatsApp.

What photos a pizzeria needs and which ones don't work

Google publishes minimum requirements by category that add up to twelve: 3 exterior shots, captured from each approach direction and at different times of day; 3 interior shots; 3 food and drink shots, evenly lit and featuring your top sellers; and 3 shots of your team.

Four don't work. The scanned menu: a price inside a JPEG isn't text that AI can crawl or cite. Stock photos with a generic pizza. Heavy-filter photos: Google requires images that are in focus, well-lit, and unaltered. And photos of dishes no longer on the menu.

Different rules apply to the profile

In your Business Profile the format is JPG or PNG, not WebP; the file must weigh between 10 KB and 5 MB, with a minimum resolution of 250 x 250 pixels, recommended 720 x 720. That explains the photos Google silently rejects: they come from WhatsApp re-compressed below 10 KB. Video supports up to 30 seconds and 75 MB. Everything takes 24 to 48 hours to approve and requires a verified profile.

A single afternoon session supplies all three channels: website, profile, and social media. Measure before and after using 6.1 What to measure: if LCP drops below 2.5 seconds, menu clicks go up on their own.