Lightbox loading really slow on website

Question

Does anyone else have this issue? I created a few lightbox widgets on one page, thumbnails are 32kb, the larger image that pops up is around 200kb and are all compressed for the web. Seems like those are small enough files, but the page takes up to 10-15 seconds to load and I've tried it on multiple computers with different speeds of internet and different browsers. This is my first attempt with this software and designing a website so any help would be greatly appreciated:
http://newleafdesigncenter.com/gallery.html

Answer 1

Looking at the page a bit closer, it appears the images aren't optimized. Rather they appear to be roughly the size they would be if saved at 100 quality JPEG out of Photoshop. Using 100 quality defeats the purpose of using JPEG. For most photographic images a quality setting of 50 will give acceptable results. For many images you can go lower with no clearly visible impact. A quality setting of 50 would likely cut the image file sizes by a factor of 5.
Note that Muse will optimize images, but only if the images are resized or cropped in Muse (or have specific effects applied that are baked into a new image at output time). If you sized the images outside of Muse then imported them, the output files are your input files, since Muse assumes that if you sized them you also optimized them.
If you use Save for Web on your images in Photoshop and choose JPEG with a Quality of 50 or less, I expect it will cut your page load time by 75%, or perhaps more (though I am still curious how BC server performance compares to your hosting provider for the same content).