You’ll need to use WordPress Image Compression Plugins if you’re using many full-sized images on your WordPress site. Take note that using too many unoptimized images on your site causes your pages to load slowly. The lighter the weight of your website context, especially, images – the faster your page loads. And the better it is for SEO and ranking.
The constant growth of mobile users increases the necessity for mobile website optimization. If you don’t want to get many rejections and lose money due to poor ad performance, we’d recommend you start using some of the WordPress image compression plugins and optimization tools we’re about to list below.
Keep in mind, a slow website affects your SEO, increases bounce rates, and keeps your audience at a distance. Fortunately, this article will help you learn how to easily optimize all the images on your website (manually or on autopilot) while using some of the topmost best WordPress image compression plugins for optimal results.
As a result, you’ll gain better loading times. We are going to achieve all this through the use of plugins and other more specific methods. Eventually, we use some of them on our website and so should you. Whilst, bearing in mind, that most of your competitors are always a step ahead when it comes to their strategic content SEO audit and other plans.
What Are WordPress Image Compression Plugins?
WordPress Image Compression Plugins are toolkits that allow you to easily optimize images for better speed and performance in general. Technically, it’s worth mentioning that great WordPress image optimizer plugins can quickly and easily cease drag load and optimize the image weights up to 80% without any loss of quality.
Extensive tests show the site cache features alone can make WordPress sites at least as fast as any other caching or speed plugin available and often faster. Whenever you combine the cache with the database optimization, image compression features, and minify, the speed difference with alternative solutions, that’s where all the soup broth lies.
Images are larger in size than plain text which means they take longer to load and can slow down your website. However, you’ve probably heard the saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. So, the next question is this: Why are WordPress Image Compression Plugins so important?
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Your WordPress database stores everything that you need for your website – plus many things that you don’t. In such cases, the WordPress Image Compression Plugins clear out all of this unnecessary data. Plus, they also clean up your tables and even retrieve space lost to data fragmentation.
The tables in MySQL (the database that WordPress uses) will, over time, become inefficient as data is added, removed, and moved around. Asking MySQL to optimize its tables every now and again will keep your site running as fast as possible. But, all this won’t happen all by itself.
Every time you save a new post or page, WordPress creates a revision of that post or page. If you edit a post 6 times you might have 5 copies of that post as revisions. This quickly adds lots of rarely-used data to your database tables, making them unnecessarily bloated, and slower to access.
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There might also be thousands of spam and unapproved comments in your comments table. As such, WordPress Image Compression Plugins can clean and remove all those in a single click. Since they reports which database tables have overhead and wasted spaces. Thus, allowing you to shrink and get rid of those wasted spaces.
All in all, site caching increases speed and performance while reducing the server’s use of resources. And with a minimal configuration, caching your site with any available WordPress image compression plugins — of your choice is so easy.
All thanks to a load of useful features like:
- Cache preloading to ensure the cache is always ready and loaded.
- Gzip compression of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to reduce site load time.
- Device-Specific cache to ensure the optimized page version is always served.
- Advanced cache exclusion rules to cache almost anything by excluding logged-in users, specific URLs, or cookies.
- Browser Cache to instruct client browsers to reuse cached resources (HTML, CSS, JS, images) if no recent changes.
Images make your content more engaging and interactive. Therefore, to improve your WordPress website speed, you need to optimize your images for the web. The best way to optimize your website images is by using Adobe Photoshop.
There are also many other image editing software you can use before you upload the image to WordPress. Eventually, all this gives you a lot more control over the quality of images on your website.
The Topmost Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins
In reality, not all users are comfortable working with image editing programs. Luckily, there are several WordPress image compression plugins that can help you with that. For some, optimizing every single image they upload sounds so tacky.
These plugins optimize your images by automatically compressing them. While at the same time, using the smaller-sized version on your website. Below is a video guide on how to optimize images for web performance without losing quality.
And now, if you’re done watching the video, let’s take a look at the best WordPress image compression plugins list. As well as how they stack up in terms of image optimization, performance, and quality below.
1. WP-Optimize
WP-Optimize is a revolutionary, all-in-one WordPress performance plugin that cleans your database, compresses your images, and caches your site.
Not to mention, their cache feature is built around the world’s fastest caching engine. This simple, popular and highly effective tool has everything you need. While allowing you to keep your website fast and thoroughly optimized!
It does it in three clever ways:
- First, it allows you to clean and optimize your database.
- Secondly, it gives you the option to compress your images.
- Then again, it allows you to cache your pages, for super-fast load times.
- It also enables you to minify and asynchronise CSS and JavaScript (aka. “defer CSS JavaScript”).
NEW: The built-in minify feature adds another layer of optimization, reducing the size and number of requests to your server. You can download the plugin or even see other additional information here.
2. reSmush.it
We can without any doubt say that other than WP-Optimize, reSmush is one of the best WordPress image compression plugins. Simply, because it allows you to automatically optimize images on upload. As well as offer a bulk optimization option for older images.
It uses the reSmush API to optimize images and allows you to choose the optimization level for your uploads. While providing image size reduction based on several advanced algorithms.
Since its API accepts JPG, PNG, and GIF files up to 5MB, the plugin includes a bulk operation to optimize all your pictures in 2 clicks. As well as change your image optimization level to fit your needs!
On a global scale, this service is used by more than 400,000 websites on different CMS. Like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, etc. It also includes an option to exclude some pictures of the optimizer and much more here.
3. Robin Image Optimizer
The Robin image optimizer is a WordPress-free image optimizer plugin —with zero limitations in terms of the number of images and optimization quality. The only thing that you may stumble across is the image weight, which shouldn’t exceed 5 MB.
So, with the Robin image optimizer, you can make your website faster by reducing the weight of images. Robin image optimizer is a smart and advanced image optimizer that really stands out among other WordPress plugins. You can see the full details about this plugin here.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
In addition to Mr. Robin above, the EWWW Image Optimizer is a great option among WordPress image compression plugins. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly.
And it can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk. Uniquely, it performs all compression on your own servers which means you don’t need to sign up for an account to get an API key. It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins.
As well as those stored outside your media library folders. What’s more, is that you’ll not require an account in order to use this plugin. But you can sign up for the EWWW API to get all the other additional features. You can also download it from their plugin page.
5. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
The ShortPixel Image Optimizer is another useful WordPress image compression plugin. It requires you to get an API key by providing your email address. The basic free account allows you to compress up to 100 images per month.
So, you’ll need to upgrade to their paid plans to increase this limit. This particular plugin starts compressing images as soon as you activate it. And it stores your original images in a separate folder. It also allows you to compare the original file with the compressed version.
More so, in order to see the quality difference. ShortPixel is also packed with other advanced features which you can see here in much more detail. With the ability to choose comparison formats.
6. Compress JPEG & PNG
Another optional tool to use is the Compress JPEG & PNG plugin that’s created by the team behind TinyPNG. You’ll need to create an account to use the plugin or rather download the plugin from the WordPress plugins page.
With this plugin, you can only optimize 100 images each month with a free account. Whereas, it can automatically compress images upon upload. And you can also bulk-optimize older images.
The plugin settings allow you to choose which image sizes you want to optimize. Additionally, you can also set a maximum size for your original uploads. Images larger than that size will be automatically resized by the plugin.
7. WP Smush
WP Smush is another popular WordPress image compression plugin. It automatically compresses images on upload and can also be used to compress and optimize your older image files.
You can also set maximum image resolution, and your images will scale down to more reasonable sizes while being compressed. The free version of the plugin doesn’t require you to create an account to use their API key.
The bulk optimization feature allows you to optimize up to 50 images at a time. And you can rerun the bulk optimizer to compress more images. You can see a more detailed review of WP Smush with pros and cons.
8. Google Lighthouse And SmartFrame
In addition, you can also the Google Lighthouse tool or SmartFrame. With Lighthouse, you can upload a JSON file generated by Google’s Lighthouse website auditing tool. This plugin will compress and replace all flagged images using the reSmush.it API.
All you’ll need to do is run Lighthouse on the page of your website you want to optimize images. The easiest way to do this is by using Chrome Developer Tools. But, you may also utilize the Lighthouse Chrome Extension or run an audit on the command line using Node.
Then again, download the report as a JSON file. In the WordPress Dashboard, navigate to Media -> Lighthouse Image Optimizer, upload the JSON file, and click “Optimize Images.”
And as we’ve mentioned, you can also use SmartFrame. This plugin allows you to optimize how images are displayed with the addition of other key features that are also quite beneficial.
Takeaway,
Depending on your WordPress site setup, page caching can be what makes the biggest difference to your website’s speed and performance. Caching involves keeping dynamic data in a temporary storage area so that it can be retrieved in an instant.
And this is a surefire way to ensure that web pages load at a lightning-fast speed. Practically, a powerful yet simple cache feature can generate the cache when a user visits any page or post on your site. WordPress processes the dynamic PHP files to generate that page.
Other More Related Resource References:
- Autoptimize | How To Minify Your Site Data Using A Plugin
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- What Is A Featured Image? Why It Matters Plus How To Use It
- WP Automatic Plugin | #1 Tool To Post Walmart Products To Site Direct
- How To Index New Website Content In SERPs | 5 Key Steps
Some of these plugins save it into a static html file in the cache folder. And all this happens so that when the next user visits, the page is cached and doesn’t need processing. This caching results in a much faster loading time. While giving a slight break to your server.
Finally, we hope this guide was helpful. But, if you’ll need more help, you can Consult Us and let us know how we can sort you. You can also share your additional thoughts and questions in our comments section. Also, don’t forget that you can Donate to support what we do, as well as to motivate our Digital Online Web Experts for their great work.
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