1,784,655 bytes to 36,616, by moving one file

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:53:00 -0500

The desktop screenshot is 6664 × 2168 and 1.74 MB. It was being served at full size into a column about 672px wide. Every byte past that width was downloaded and thrown away.

What surprised me is that the fix isn’t a setting. It’s where the file lives.

From this:

content/posts/first-try.md
assets/my-virtual-desktop-setup.png

to this:

content/posts/first-try/index.md
content/posts/first-try/my-virtual-desktop-setup.png

That’s a page bundle, and inside one the image stops being a loose asset and becomes a page resource — reachable via .Page.Resources.Get, carrying its own front matter for alt text and caption and credit, and eligible for .Resize. The theme’s figure partial then does what it already does for its own images: anything over 1400px wide gets resized and converted to WebP at q82.

performance on jwogrady

1,784,655 bytes to 36,616, by moving one file