While The Church Co is already optimized for fast page loading times and overall speed, the one thing that can hinder it (and any website builder) and make it feel slow is large media files, especially photos and videos. If a page on TCC feels like it's loading slowly for visitors then it's likely due to images that are unnecessarily large. To keep your site as fast as possible, we recommend trying to keep images under 1mb, ideally under 500kb, and only using jpgs for things like photos.

If it's a graphic that has a transparent background (like a logo), then it's best to use a png file. However, if it's just a photo then you can save a considerable amount of space by making sure it's a jpg instead of a png. If you're on a Mac then you can convert a png to a jpg by opening it in Preview then exporting the image as a jpg. Both PC's and Macs have third party apps available that allow you to bulk convert and there are plenty of online programs that can help you convert a png photo to a jpg, like Shutterstock, png2jpg.com and Online-Convert.com.

If you've already converted your png photos to jpg and your images are still too large, here's one example where the header image on this church's page was 17mb alone. For context, that 3x-4x the size of what you'd want the whole page size to be (meaning all images, content and code).

The photo was 6000x4000, which is higher definition than even 4K (3840x2160). I went ahead and opened it in the built-in editor, but you can use any 3rd party image editor to do this as well (like Mac's built in Preview or ImageResizer.com). I resized it to be just 2600 wide, but could have gone down to 1920 or even less and the picture quality would have remained unchanged to the untrained eye.

The Church Co has a built-in compression system that applies to images that are resized from the media library, so it went from 17mb to less than 1mb in size (just 700kb).

While the page load speed will be noticeable by that change alone, it's a significant difference when this optimization is done to all images on the page (even those that are around 2-3mb in size). This speed difference will be even more noticeable by your site visitors that are on their phone, which on average makes up at least 60% of church website visitors.

Just as with images, videos need to be optimized for web speed as well. The Church Co only supports hosted video for video background headers and videos only up to 15mb in size. This is because we want to make sure that your site visitors aren't waiting for a large background video to load just so they can view a page.

To keep a video below 15mb you'll want to make sure you follow these steps:

And if you've tried those things and still can't get the header video background below 15mb (or want to use a video somewhere else), then we also support YouTube and Vimeo videos as header video backgrounds.