Wix’s image compression has driven me crazy. I’ve spoken to support, dead end, no interest in changing.
I love using beautiful backdrops, optimizing the image size myself to retain crispness. Other web editors I’ve used never had this problem. They allowed you to use the original image file without any backend manipulation.
I just did a test:
Compressed a background image using tinypng. Resolution: 3840 x 2160. Got its size to 423 KB. It’s sharp. Super crisp.
Load it in wix and publish. EXTRACTED THE IMAGE from the published page, and here’s its stats:
3640 x 2046 (smaller) 596 KB (LARGER) And it’s a blurry mess.
So, while Wix is stubbornly standing by their approach to force their own backend image compression, it is objectively worse on optimization. Wix may have some users who don’t know what they’re doing, but it’s also used by professional designers who do. And with this kind of proof, there’s no reason to continue to force images that are substantially lower in quality yet for no benefit since they are poorly optimized.
Please allow us to disable your backend image compression and let us use original files. Again, I’ve done this for years (since pre-2010) with other web-based editors.
You can probably avoid Wix’s compression and display the image by adding an <img> tag within a custom element and embedding that custom element into Wix.
There may be certain background images you really want to display beautifully, and just having those can enhance the sophistication of your site. I think it’s a good idea to use this method specifically for such special images.
This might be good news for you as well, so I thought I’d share it with you.
Of course, I don’t think Wix has officially announced support for this yet, so please proceed with caution before using it extensively. That said, I believe this could be a promising idea to fundamentally solve the issues you’ve been facing. Converting to AVIF is easy using https://squoosh.app/
YES! That works perfectly! And I never knew about Squoosh, that’s so much better than what I was using. So many settings and super flexible. Thank you for the help!
I don’t like the avif compression, I created a new image because it was blurry on wix. Looks good on another web page, upload it to wix, and it is not as crisp a it was on the other web page that did not compress it. I need the better resolution, speed is not an issue for me, I wish I could disable the avif compress on wix. Kind of annoying.
It might be that my knowledge is a bit behind, but has Wix started converting images to AVIF by default? Has Wix switched from WebP to AVIF? AVIF conversion is slower than WebP, so I didn’t expect Wix to adopt it. Also, AVIF images are significantly sharper than WebP images. WebP can sometimes have a blurry appearance. By the way, there is a way to avoid Wix’s automatic image compression. If you use a custom element and specify the image URL within an img tag inside it, you should be able to load the image you uploaded to Wix without any compression.
Just coming back to update. This is still a huge problem. (Wix do you read these?)
In some cases, when Wix has its way with any image I’ve compressed meticulously in Squoosh (balancing file size with quality — often different settings per image to get it right, and I mean meticulously) Wix re-compresses it and DOUBLES the file size while looking not as sharp. The only workaround is, as others have pointed out, to link it via url. Fine, but in Wix’s interface can cause problems with layout, so it’s not ideal.
Wix, I’m trying to optimize my site, and your backend is un-optimizing it!
Please allow us to opt out of Wix’s image compression. Yes, that might mean for some who don’t know what they’re doing, their site will be slow to load. So come up with a solution — a warning messages anytime an image exceeds a certain data size. Solved.
Indeed, having the freedom to choose image quality should be more easily accessible, and the idea of triggering a light warning for that purpose is a good one.
We do read the conversations happening, despite not always joining the conversation. Are you able to share an example of a site where the image is being compressed beyond what you’d expect? I’d love to have the team take a look into it
It’s literally every image, in any site I’ve built in wix. You can see it anywhere if you look at the size of the file in the uploaded images, publish the site, extract/download any of those images from the published site, then compare. Sometimes the wix-compressed file is 50% more. Sometimes is double or even triple the data size.
Again, compressing in squoosh is a phenomenal experience and you can really fine-tune images to get the most perception of quality vs. the data size. So after working so hard on that, getting my images super optimized for faster loading, then seeing wix double them and un-optimize my work, while looking way worse in quality, is a huge downer.
That said, I believe this could be a promising idea to fundamentally solve the issues you’ve been facing. Converting to AVIF is easy using 
