Portfolio speed check
Paste your address and find out which photograph is slowing your site down, by filename and by megabyte, alongside Google's own score for the same page.
Free, no account, nothing to install. Your photos are never downloaded and the address is not stored.
Photography sites are slow for one reason
The photographs. Every other cause is a rounding error next to a home page carrying fifteen megabytes of full-resolution exports. It happens because the file that looked perfect in Lightroom gets uploaded exactly as it came out, and nothing along the way mentions that it is forty times larger than the page needs.
What a visitor gets is a white screen, then a slow reveal, then a photograph that looks no better than the 250 KB version would have. On a phone away from wifi, which is where a lot of people meet your work first, plenty of them are gone before the first image arrives.
What you get back
A filename and a number of megabytes, not a grade. The heaviest photograph on the page named outright, what is loading before anyone has scrolled to it, whether phones are being sent desktop-sized files, and the alt text and title gaps quietly costing you search traffic. Google's own performance score for the same page arrives alongside it, so you can see what those megabytes cost in seconds.
Some site builders assemble their galleries in the browser after the page loads. Where that happens there is nothing in the HTML to measure, and the report tells you so rather than handing back a clean bill of health. It is worth knowing either way, because a search engine sees much the same thing on its first pass.
Where to start
With the single heaviest image. Re-export it at around 2000px on the long edge at 80% quality and it will usually lose ninety percent of its weight and none of its appearance. Then do the same to anything else over a megabyte. That one pass tends to beat every other item on the list combined.
After that, add loading="lazy" to everything below the first screen and width and height to every image, which stops the page jumping around as it loads. Then alt text, which is both what a screen reader announces and most of what image search has to work with.
None of it is photography, and none of it is work you should be doing twice a year.
Common questions
- Do you download my photos?
- No. For each image we ask its server how big the file is and nothing more, which moves a few kilobytes of headers rather than the tens of megabytes the photographs would weigh. Your images are never transferred, stored or looked at.
- Where does the address I type go?
- To our server, which fetches the page, and to Google, which runs the performance test. We keep the hostname and whether the check worked; not the full address, not the page you checked, and none of the results. This is the only tool here where anything leaves your browser, and it is because a browser cannot measure somebody else’s page.
- Where does the performance score come from?
- From Google. It is the same Lighthouse test you would get by running PageSpeed Insights yourself, and the same score Google weighs when it judges how fast your site is. It takes longer than our own checks, so it arrives underneath them when it is ready.
- Why does it say no images were found?
- Because some site builders assemble the gallery in the browser after the page loads, leaving almost nothing in the HTML that arrives. This check reads that HTML, which is roughly what a search engine sees on its first pass, so a gallery that only exists once JavaScript has run is invisible to both.
- How big should a photo on my site be?
- Around 200 to 300 KB for a full-width photograph, and under 150 KB for a thumbnail in a grid. Photographers routinely serve 4 to 8 MB files because that is what came out of Lightroom. At the size it is actually displayed, the difference is invisible and the file is twenty times smaller.
- Can I check more than one page?
- Yes, up to five an hour. Start with your home page, then try a gallery page if the two are built differently. The fix is usually the same across a site, so one or two pages is normally enough to find it.
- Is a slow portfolio really costing me work?
- It costs you the visitors who never see it. Google treats loading speed as a ranking signal and measures it from real visits, and a photography site is the hardest case because the content is the heavy part. The reassuring bit is that the fix is usually one or two files rather than a rebuild.
Galleries that are fast without the homework
Everything this tool looks for is handled on upload in Xposure: images optimised on arrival, responsive sizes generated for you, and galleries served from the edge. Your exports go in and a fast page comes out.
See a live gallery5 more free tools for photographers are on the tools index: gallery platform cost calculator, delivery count planner, package builder, effective hourly rate and cancellation policy generator.