Photos: what sells a villa, and what drags your site down
A photo straight off a phone weighs 4 MB and brings your page to its knees. How to keep images that sell the island without making US guests wait.
Nobody books these islands on text. People book on a photo: the view off the terrace, the colour of the water at five in the afternoon, the plate exactly as it arrives. Your images are your strongest sales argument, by a distance.
They are also, almost always, what makes your site slow. That is the contradiction worth fixing, and it can be fixed completely, without giving up a single photograph.
The arithmetic nobody runs
A photo straight off a recent phone routinely weighs 2 to 5 MB and measures around 4,000 pixels across. Put twelve of them on a gallery page and you have just asked a visitor to download 40 MB to look at a bedroom.
On the fibre line in your office, you never notice. On the phone of a guest planning a February trip from Boston on cellular data, the page assembles itself line by line while the progress bar crawls. A Google study puts at 53% the share of mobile visitors lost once the wait passes three seconds. Add hosting sitting in Europe, which routinely takes 6 to 8 seconds to answer from the United States, and the finest villa on the island never gets seen. We went through that in a separate article.
Resize before anything else
This is the one step that cuts the weight twenty-fold, and it needs no paid software.
A phone screen shows a full-width photo across roughly 400 points, which is 800 real pixels on a high-density display. A large desktop screen asks for 2,000 at most. Your 4,000 pixels therefore do nothing: the browser downloads every one of them, then shrinks the image on screen. You are paying in waiting time for pixels nobody will ever see.
Settle on 1,600 pixels wide for large images and 800 for gallery thumbnails. macOS Preview, any photo editor, or your phone's own export tool will do it in a click. A properly resized villa photo lands between 150 and 300 KB: the same picture, twenty times lighter, identical to the eye.
The right format, and the right moment to load
Save as WebP or AVIF rather than JPEG. At matching quality those formats are considerably lighter, and every current browser reads them. On the sites we ship this conversion is automatic: you drop in your photo and the best format is served to each visitor.
Then there is a rule of common sense that a great many sites break. The large photo at the top of the page must load immediately. Every other one, the ones you have to scroll to reach, should wait until the visitor gets close:
<img src="/terrace.webp" width="1600" height="1067" loading="lazy" alt="Terrace overlooking the bay">
The width and height attributes stop the text from jumping when the image lands, which is the annoying shift that makes people tap the wrong thing. loading="lazy" holds the download back until the visitor approaches. Never put it on the main photo: you would be delaying the one image that has to be there straight away.
What to actually photograph here
How many matters far less than which. Eight real photographs beat thirty.
Show what the guest is actually buying: the exact view from the terrace, not a wide shot of the island. The bedroom as it is, at its honest size. The pool at the hour people swim in it. The dish as served, on your plate, on your table.
And delete the stock imagery. A generic Caribbean beach proves nothing, your visitors recognise it on sight, and there is a fair chance your competitor is using the very same file. A photo taken on a phone and cropped properly beats a flawless picture that is not yours.
On light: midday sun flattens everything. Hard shadows under the umbrellas, a white sky, water with no depth. Late afternoon gives St Martin and St Barts the light people travel here for, and it is the light they want to see before they book.
Those same photographs feed your Google Business Profile, which is often read before your site. One clean set of images therefore works twice over — we covered setting up the profile here.
The line of text Google reads
Every image deserves an alt attribute: a short, factual description of what is in frame. "Terrace overlooking Grand Case bay at sunset" rather than "IMG_4821". That is what Google Images and screen readers read. It costs five seconds per photo, and it is the only place your images turn into findable text.
What can be measured
We promise nobody the top spot for "villa St Barts". What can be verified: the total weight of your home page, its mobile PageSpeed score, and the time before the first image appears. Those three numbers can be read today, for free, and compared again after the fix. On our sites the target is plain: under 2 seconds, PageSpeed above 90, photographs included. Measurable, not promised.
Studio Lagon builds fast websites for villas, restaurants and hotels in St Martin and St Barts — see the packages and pricing, or send your current site address through the contact form for an honest read.