Compress Images for Shopify

The right size for product images

Resize main product images to 1200–2000 px on the longest side (covers the zoom view on almost every theme) and compress at quality 80. Gallery thumbnails can drop to 400–600 px. Resize first, then compress — shrinking a 4000 px original removes most of the weight before the encoder even starts.

For per-platform sizing and a full worked example, see image compression for e-commerce.

Format for product photos

Product photography is photographic content, so use WebP or MozJPEG, not PNG. Reserve PNG for flat graphics like size charts, badges, and logos. A product photo saved as PNG can be five to ten times larger with no visible benefit.

A worked example: one product, twelve photos

Take a typical apparel listing: one hero shot, five alternate angles, and six thumbnails, all coming off a camera at 4000×4000 and roughly 4 MB each. Uploaded as-is, that is about 48 MB the browser has to handle for a single product page.

Process the set properly first — hero resized to 1600 px at quality 82 (about 240 KB, or 170 KB as WebP), five angles at 1600 px WebP (about 160 KB each), six thumbnails at 500 px WebP (about 35 KB each) — and the page drops from 48 MB to under 1.2 MB. That is a 97% reduction, and a shopper could not tell the compressed hero from the original. It is the gap between a page that loads instantly and one that makes people wait.

Faster stores sell more

Shoppers leave pages that feel slow, and a heavy hero image is the most common cause of a poor Largest Contentful Paint score — which also hurts your search ranking. Compressing every product photo is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for both speed and conversions.