A holiday-rental site made fast and fixed on iPad

A German agency brought me a holiday-rental site with a problem guests had on iPad: the page opened without its main photo. And the home page weighed 13 MB.

In Chrome’s iPad emulation everything looked fine. On a real iPad the photo was gone. The cause was a fixed parallax background, which Safari on iPad draws unreliably, so I switched the effect off on tablets and phones and left desktop as it was.

Why an iPad downloaded 17 MB

My first guess was the server, so I tested it with 108 requests, 30 at a time. It wasn’t the server. The image sizes rule made the iPad’s sharp screen pick the 2,048 px originals. On a separate test copy I converted all images to WebP with proper sizes in between, and fixed the galleries that loaded each photo in two to four sizes at once. Three Lighthouse runs and a real Safari gave the same answer: the home page went from 13.19 MB to 2.13 MB.

Analytics and Google Maps loaded before anyone agreed to cookies. With the owners’ agreement I removed both and put an aerial photo with a route button in place of the map, so the site needs no cookie banner at all. I also put the real details on the contact page instead of demo text, added a footer and made the header visible on iPad.

The owner checked the test copy on his own iPad and said yes. I backed up the live site, moved the copy to production and cleaned another property’s leftover data out of the booking plugin. The new version has been live since August 2026.