How are you handling product pages that carry twenty odd photos?

A gun shop client has one page doing most of their traffic and its their ruger lcp 380 acp listing. 26 photos of the same pistol, all full size, all loading on frist paint. Lazy loading helped a bit but the gallery script still wants the first six up front.

I ended up cutting the gallery down to four visible thumbs and pulling the rest in on click. LCP went from 4.4s to 1.9s on mobile.

tl;dr the gallery is the problem on product pages, not the theme