In this study, the influence of speckle size on contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) and resolution is examined based on the object dimensions in the macroscopic and microscopic regimes. This research shows that for microscopic samples the conventional scaling laws are no longer effective and the CNR does not counter-propagate in the same manner as the resolution. To our knowledge, a deviation in CNR scaling on speckle size is observed for the first time in the field of microscopic ghost imaging. This result was verified using two different sample shapes. In addition, numerical analysis revealed that the noise of the photodiode is a limiting factor for the CNR. Based on these findings, the conditions for identifying the parameter set that maximizes the CNR and provides high resolution images was defined, which achieving high-quality microscopic ghost images. (C) 2019 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement