Those of you that have worked through my tutorials will know that one of the points I continuously raise is the importance of scaling images down to a size at or near the resolution of the image in the browser screen.
There is no point downloading a 5MB file where a 50kB file would have done the same job, I am not exaggerating here, it does happen frequently.
I go around and back the sites up 4 times a year and some are getting inexplicably large, so I go in and check and find out there are lots of very large images which have been uploaded to the site. Of course the images all look ok. However if you are out and about and using a mobile connection as many people do these days they are downloading 5MB vs 50kB; 100 x more data than they need to download with no additional benefits. However they are paying per MB for their connection!
In addition to costing your mobile users their data allowance for the privilege of visiting your site, your backups are also growing in size.
But I have found a solution!
Go to your Plugins option on the menu of your site and put into the search box WP Smush. This plugin will go through your images and reduce them in size to something that is more appropriate for a website. It can also be set up to resize anything you upload, just in case you forget.
I have used this on a couple of sites this month to work through lots of images which were too big and taking up too much space in the hosting.
Use something like this and your sites will load more quickly.