I don't really stick to regular blog posting, and I have realised that possibly less is more for my own website. Therefore, I've spent a few hours removing the featured images from my posts and stripping back fluff from the blog index and post pages. Not only will it reduce the number of bytes travelling from my server to your screen, it also removes the blatant stock and AI slop imagery I have used to produce a featured image.
Here I am going to quickly break down the reasons why, for me, I feel that stock and AI generated images were just a plain bad idea.
The stock photos were never doing anything
Every blog post I've ever written about, used to have a header image containing either a laptop on a desk or someone typing. An abstract swirl of blue light meant to suggest "technology". None of these images added anything to the post, they were there because we all expect a blog to have a featured image, and because bare headings felt somehow incomplete without an image.
Then AI images definitely made it worse
More recently, with the boom of AI and image generation, my fix for "I need a featured image" was to generate one. I wouldn't spend much time on this because for me, it is just filling a gap, so I'd type a prompt, get an image, shake my head at how poor it was and slap it on the post.
I did this a handful of times, but even since the first one I did it bothered me. The images were technically new, but they weren't true, and they didn't depict anything remotely interesting or very real. The earliest ones we even pixelated and look poor quality before realising it was an AI image.
Because of my hatred and lack of enthusiasm for blogging they weren't chosen for any reason beyond "the gap needed filling". At best, they were decorative and at worst they were noise dressed up as content and now what people have started, rightly, calling slop.
Bolting an AI-generated illustration onto blog posts felt dishonest, lazy and very obviously AI. I don't want people coming across my posts to instantly look at the featured image and think that this is just an AI built site with a bot behind it and no real opinions. If I'm selling the idea that "you deal directly with the person who writes the code", the blog should look like it too.
Proof it doesn't cost you readers
I often scour the internet for opinions, advice and general geeky posts about web development, and some of the regular sites I visit made me realise that perhaps not bothering with the appalling imagery at all might be okay.
MXroute's blog is plain text from top to bottom and is dense, opinionated, with long-form posts about running an email service, with nothing but headings and prose. There's no header image softening the landing on a post. And it doesn't stop the posts having the same impact.
Martin Underhill's blog at tempertemper is the same story from a different angle. Over 300 posts spanning many years, listed plainly with a title, a date, a category, and a one-line summary. There are no thumbnails, or header art beyond the words themselves. It's a blog entirely about design and accessibility, written by someone who clearly understands visual design.
Then there's Chasing Code, a Chicago developer's blog covering Laravel, Livewire, Svelte and general dev life. As with the previous two, post after post, with little to no imagery in sight, except on the odd entry where a single screenshot shows the thing he was talking about. It's not an anti-image stance, it's images being used only when they're the point rather than the padding.
None of these three sites is trying to look austere for the sake of it. They just don't treat imagery as a tax you pay to be allowed to publish. Reading them back to back was the moment I stopped asking "what image should go here?" and started asking "does this post need one at all?", which for me I felt, is almost never.
Increasing sustainability factors, aligning with my goals
One area I focus on is making sure every website I build is a lean as possible. Because having what everyone now coins as a "sustainable", "eco-friendly", or "green" website isn't just about reducing the impact on the environment. It is also about the performance and speed of a website because however you look at it they go hand in hand.
Every additional element whether it is an image, a fancy animation, or code from an analytics platform is a request to a server somewhere in that ephemeral cloud. It is all powered by electricity, from the device you use at home to the hubs and networks that routes you to the correct server and retrieve the information your browser has requested.
Focussing on the point of why I removed images from my blog, on its own, one image is nothing. Multiplied across thousands of page views a month, across every post on every site, it adds up to a genuinely wasteful amount of energy spent on pictures that told the reader nothing.
I'm not going to pretend that removing featured images from my blog is a meaningful contribution to decarbonising the internet but, it's a decision I can control, on a site I own, and it's consistent with a broader instinct I have about running lean infrastructure. The same instinct that has me thinking carefully about server sprawl rather than spinning up more VPS instances than I need.
What's left is faster and, I think, better
Without the imagery, my posts are just text, code blocks, and the occasional image when it rightly earns its place and helps explain what I am trying to portray. It will help the pages to load close to instantly and there's less for the browser to fetch, and less visual noise between you and the point I'm trying to make.
It's also, frankly, easier to write. I no longer spend ten minutes hunting for an image that vaguely fits the subject. I write the post, I publish it, I move on. That's more time spent on the thing that actually matters here, which is explaining how this stuff works.
The bigger point
None of this is a manifesto against images in general, a genuine screenshot of an error, a real diagram of how two servers talk to each other, a photograph I took on my iPhone, all still have a place, and all still appear where they help. What I've cut is the decorative layer that exist only because it is the standard expected.
If you're someone who spends the time to write intereseting content (this is a very loose attribute to my posts), it's worth asking of every image you're about to add, "Is this true, is it necessary, and would anyone actually eat it if it were food?" If the honest answer is no, you can probably delete it and nobody will miss it. Perhaps including, you.