Found out my blog's bounce rate was 87% because of one stupid mistake

I was looking at Google Analytics last night and saw my blog had an 87% bounce rate. Turns out it wasn't the content, it was my page load speed. On mobile, the hero image was loading in 8 seconds. I checked with PageSpeed Insights and it gave me a score of 32 out of 100. Fixed it by compressing images and using lazy loading, and the bounce rate dropped to 55% in just 2 weeks. Has anyone else seen huge improvements from just shaving off a few seconds of load time?

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the_vera8d ago

Man, 8 seconds for a hero image is brutal. My own blog was sitting at a 4 second load time for months and I just thought it was fine because desktop was fast. I downloaded that Chrome Lighthouse extension and it literally called my site "barely usable" which felt like a personal attack honestly. Compressed my biggest images and switched to WebP format and my load time went from 4.2 seconds down to 1.8 seconds. The bounce rate drop was insane, like from 76% to 48% in about a week. It's wild how we spend so much time on writing and then a slow loading picture ruins all that work.