Photos and image files can be large and take a long time to download. When you use really large files like this on your webpages, then it slows down the loading of your site for users.
Making your site faster to load is not only about not frustrating your users– Google and other search engines use site speed as one factor in how high your site will rank in searches.
Be sure to “optimize” images (make small for the web) before you upload them to your site.
You don’t have to be a Photoshop wizard to do this! One great (and free!) tool for doing this is Picmonkey.com. You don’t need to create an account – just upload, make changes to your image, and download it back to your computer.
To quickly and easily make your image optimized for the web, choose “Resize” on Picmonkey, and make the width (in pixels) of your image somewhere between 200px and 300px. The ratio should be locked, so that the height also will diminish.
When you send the image back to your computer, choose the lowest quality, aiming to get your image sized down to 30 kB or less. Even a fairly large photo on your page should be more than 50 kB.