Serve images via a CDN
A CDN might be something for you if you have a heavy photo website and your visors are from all over the world. These CDN's focus on serving images and are very good at this.
These services can load your image very fast because the server is 100% focussed on serving your image. On a regular WordPress server the server also needs to be good at other things. A CDN service have servers all over the world. So someone from Japan can get the images from a serverpark near Tokyo instead of New York.
IMGIX and Cloudinary are also very good at manipulating the images. Some things you can do
- Give the CDN a 4mb and 4000 pixels width image and request a compressed version which is 400 pixels width. This way you don't have to resize and compress images on your Wordpress site, Nuxt or Node.js site.
- Make sure the images with persons are cropped the right way where the face is in the center of the photo.
- Watermark important images.
- Create a srcset with multiple sizes.