Images and video are the heaviest thing on almost every product page, and the single most common reason a store fails its Largest Contentful Paint. The shopper wants to see the product clearly; the browser has to download and decode all of it. Those two goals fight, and most stores let the media win at the expense of the page. Ecommerce image optimization is how the best stores stop them fighting, keeping the gallery rich and the page fast at the same time.
Why media is the most common reason stores fail on speed
When we scanned 80,000 stores across the four major ecommerce platforms in early 2026, 27,753 of them, almost thirty-five percent, were loading their images eagerly rather than lazy-loading them: the browser pulled down every picture on the page, including the ones far below the fold, before the shopper had asked to see any of them. That is one image-handling check among several, and a third of stores miss it, which is exactly the kind of thing that drags Largest Contentful Paint down on a phone.
The stores that resolve the fight do it without showing worse photography. They serve the right format at the right size and load nothing the shopper has not asked to see yet. Here is how.
Three stores that keep media fast
Made In
On the Curated Kitchen cookware-set product page, Made In keeps a large gallery light through format and timing. Its product images are served as AVIF and WebP at quality 75 through the Sanity image CDN, and 115 below-the-fold images carry loading="lazy" while the hero loads straight away. Its field data on mobile is LCP 1.68 seconds, INP 172 milliseconds, CLS 0.01. Made In does not tailor image width to the device, the way Ruggable does further down, but the modern formats handle the compression and lazy-loading holds back everything below the fold, and that is enough to keep a heavy cookware gallery fast.
Cabaïa
On the Mardin tote product page, the gallery itself is stills, but the recommendation carousels lower down carry video, and Cabaïa keeps that video off the critical path. Each clip sits behind a lightweight poster image. The video itself is an HLS stream that is not fetched on load. When the page first paints, only the small poster frames download; the heavier streams stay idle until the carousel scrolls into view. Its field data on mobile is LCP 1.87 seconds, INP 123 milliseconds, CLS 0.04. The motion is there to sell the products, but because each clip waits behind a cheap poster it never competes with the first paint.
Ruggable
On a washable-rug product page, Ruggable leans on responsive sizing for a product whose entire appeal is one large, flat image: a 29-entry srcset paired with 40 sizes hints gives the browser dozens of exact-fit options, so it requests exactly the resolution the slot needs instead of a desktop-sized file on a phone, the images arrive as WebP, and below-the-fold shots are lazy-loaded. Its field data on mobile is LCP 2.37 seconds, INP 217 milliseconds (a near-pass on interactivity), CLS 0.04. The image looks full-resolution while the phone never downloads more pixels than its screen can render, which is the whole lever.
What ecommerce image optimization looks like in practice
Ecommerce image optimization is not about using fewer or smaller pictures. It is about never making the browser decode more pixels than the screen can show, and never loading anything the shopper has not asked to see. The stores above keep their photography rich and their pages fast at the same time by treating format, size, and timing as three separate decisions: a modern format, sized to the display where it counts, and deferred until it enters the viewport. No single store has to win all three to be fast, but it cannot afford to lose any of them badly. For the broader speed picture beyond media, see how the fastest stores pass Core Web Vitals.
The single thing to check on your own store: open a product page in DevTools, filter the Network panel to images, and watch what loads before you scroll. If the browser is pulling down pictures from far below the fold while the shopper is still looking at the first screen, those images are competing with the content that matters and delaying the first paint for no reason.
Scan your store to see whether it is loading images before the shopper asks for them, and where media is slowing your pages down.