Compressing images alone left speed on the table

A Bogotá blog network spent weeks optimizing images, sure that pictures were their only weight problem. Pages were still 1.9MB and slow on 3G.
The myth: images are the whole payload story. The reality: after image work, the bottleneck was uncompressed text. Their CDN wasn't applying Brotli to HTML, CSS, and JSON, and a fat 600KB JSON config shipped raw on every page.
What we changed: we enabled Brotli level 11 at the edge for all text content types and turned on edge minification.
Result: total text payload dropped from 700KB to 130KB, Bogotá page weight fell to 740KB, and load time on 3G dropped by 1.4 seconds.
Images get the attention, but unzipped text is free latency. Compress everything textual at the edge.
The number that mattered: 130KB text payload, down from 700KB.