Google “image optimizer” and “image compressor”. There is a lot of them and it’s hard to tell witch one best fit your needs.
If you are using any build tool (Gulp, Webpack…), there should be plugin for this.
If you can’t shrink image size too much, then you can load smaller blurry version at first and replace it with better quality image once document is fully loaded.
Check your page with Pagespeed for more helpful tips.
Thanks so much, appreciate your input and will look into what webpack plugins I can leverage. Any other comments on the style of the page, what you like/ don’t like would be hugely appreciated.