CMO blames website collapse on one uncompressed image

A SaaS CMO has blamed the company’s collapsing website performance on one uncompressed hero image, firmly rejecting suggestions that the real issue may be publishing 200 articles without a strategy, audience, point of view or detectable reason to exist.

Dana Whatabout, CMO of a marketing platform, identified the image during a tense marketing meeting called “Why is content not converting despite there being so much of it?”

“It’s obvious,” said Holt, pointing at a 4.8MB PNG of three people pretending to enjoy a dashboard. “This image is killing us.”

The website currently contains 214 blog posts with titles including Unlocking scalable growth through alignment, Why revenue teams need more revenue, What is revenue?, The complete guide to complete guides, and How AI is changing the future of changing the future.

None of the posts target a clear buyer stage. Several appear to answer questions nobody asked. One article starts with “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape” and then continues for 1,800 words without naming the product, customer, market or problem.

Whatabout said these were not the issue.

“Content volume is how we build authority,” she explained. “The problem is technical. People want to read our insights, but the image is stopping them from trusting our thought leadership.”

The company’s SEO manager suggested that traffic may have declined because the team had confused a publishing calendar with a content strategy.

Holt called this “a narrow search-era view” and asked whether the image had been compressed yet.

Engineering later confirmed that the image had been compressed, resized and served through a CDN, improving page speed by 0.3 seconds and doing nothing to make the article 7 ways to operationalise operational excellence worth reading.

The content team has now formed a task force to investigate whether future posts should have a target audience, search intent, business goal, or “at least one sentence a customer might say out loud.”

Holt said the team would consider these ideas after finishing its current priority: a 12-part series inspired by a CloutIn post about agentic storytelling.

Asked whether the company should delete, merge or rewrite the 200 low-value articles, Holt said the content would stay because “AI might need context.”

At press time, FunnelOtter had published a new blog post titled Image compression as a strategic growth moat.