Keep images small and fast
Big image files are the most common reason an otherwise lovely website feels slow. Visitors on phones wait, search engines notice, and the photo doesn't even look any better for it — a screen can only show so many pixels. Keeping images sensibly sized is the cheapest speed upgrade your site can get.
How it works
- Get your access prompt. Log in to bernard, open your site, and copy the prompt from Edit with AI (it contains a key that works for 12 hours).
- Paste it into your AI — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you already use — then ask it to check your images using the prompt above. It reports the oversized ones first; you choose which to deal with.
- Approve. Replacements land on a draft and the AI sends back a preview link. Check the photos still look good, press Approve, and the faster pages are live.
What "reasonably sized" means
A photo that fills the width of a page needs roughly the width of a large screen — around 1,600–2,000 pixels — and a thumbnail far less. File-wise, aim for hundreds of kilobytes, not megabytes. bernard allows up to 10 MB per file and 500 MB for the whole site, but those are ceilings, not targets; a site whose images are all a tenth of the limit will feel noticeably quicker. When you send the AI a new photo from your phone, it’s fine to try sending the original — but if your AI can’t resize images itself, it will ask you for a smaller version (most phones can resize a photo when you share it).
If you're the AI doing this: when auditing, list each image with its file size and where it's used, flag anything disproportionate, and wait for the owner to choose. When adding images, prefer modern formats like WebP or AVIF where the original allows, size the image for how it's actually displayed, and never let a decorative image cost megabytes. Keep the original aspect ratio — don't squash photos to fit.
The prompt
“Check the images on [the page or whole site] and report any that are much bigger than they need to be — don't change anything until I choose. For ones I pick, replace them with reasonably sized versions.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Log in to bernard → your site → Edit with AI → copy your access prompt, paste that into your AI first, then ask the above.
Questions people ask
- Why is my website slow to load?
- Oversized images are the usual culprit — a photo straight off a camera can be many times bigger than the screen ever shows. Smaller image files make every page faster, especially on phones.
- How big can images on my bernard site be?
- Each uploaded file can be up to 10 MB, and the whole site has 500 MB of space. But staying well under the limits is the point — a photo that displays at screen width rarely needs more than a few hundred kilobytes.
- Can the AI resize my images for me?
- It can replace an oversized image with a reasonably sized version you give it, and it can spot which images are too big. As with every change, the swap sits on a draft until you check the preview and press Approve.