Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins to Speed up Your Website
In any website, Images usually are the biggest part which helps to make the content more interactive and eye-catchy for the customers and the viewers. But Image also forms a large proportion of the weight of the page which ultimately impacts the speed of the page of the website. Images are generally larger in size in comparison to the plain text which means they take a longer time to load which slows down your website. Companies or businesspeople Hire WordPress Developers in order to get their websites designed by them so that they get the best output.
Speed of the page is important in two ways: the experience of the end-users and the search engine ranking. Both the factors are crucial enough for the success of the website, so, plugins should be used definitely to optimize the size of the images used on the website. And on the WordPress sites, the plugins for the Image optimization makes a quick impact, it’s been a long that WordPress development company have been educating people about this fact.
The above points clearly describe how important it is to optimize the images available on the website, so there are several plugins available to automate the process of Image optimization. Let’s look in detail into all those plugins.
Pre-requisites of Image Optimization:
- Images are given the meaningful names
The images which hold meaningful and relevant names perform well in the SEO process as it appears in search engines more likely. One of the easy ways is to add keywords in the title of the image.
- The file size of the image is as required
As the size of the file on the website matters a lot as it directly affects the speed of the website. The images which are unnecessarily heavier use lots of resolution and sources and slow down the speed. If these images are compressed to a smaller size, then it will definitely speed up your website.
Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins to Speed Up Your Website:
Now, let’s look into some of the most used and famous tools for optimizing the image to boost the speed of the WordPress website:
a) EWWW Image Optimizer
It is a lightweight plugin that can be run on your own server which reduces the waiting time for the third part to process your request. It has almost a million active users.
Features:
1) It supports almost all kinds of famous image formats like JPG, PNG, and PDF.
2) Stores the original images.
3) Both free and premium versions are available.
4) Optimizes the bulk images easily.
5) No limit is set for the size of the image to be compressed.
6) The missing dimensions are added to the image by default.
7) Supports conversion to next-gen formats and lazy loading.
b) Optimus
It is such a WordPress image optimization plugin that supports intelligent image optimization and also claims to reduce the size of the image by up to 70%.
Features:
1) Works in coordination with WooCommerce.
2) It is available in Free and Paid versions.
3) It provides support for Retina Images.
4) It allows automatic optimization of the Image once uploaded.
5) mass optimization is allowed here.
6) Progressive JPEGs.
7) Multisite support of WordPress
8) The codes are not required to be adjusted.
9) The load time is faster for the Blog pages
10) Conversion to the WebP image format is optional.
c) ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel is among the popular tools and has over three lac users and also allows one to compress the image in various formats.
Features:
1) Provides compression in three different levels (lossy, lossy, and bright)
2) New Images are optimized automatically
3) Saves the original files of the image
4) Silently works in the background
5) Available in both paid version as well as a free version (up to 100 images optimization)
6) It supports WebP, PNG, JPG, GIF, AVID, and PDF.
7) Compatible with WooCommerce, NextGEN Gallery, and the WPML translation plugins.
8) It is also very affordable.
d) reSmush.it
It is again another great choice for Image optimization tools. It allows the automatic optimization of the images and even offers bulk optimization.
Features:
1) One has complete control over the image quality with an easy-to-use slider.
2) Always create a copy of the original image.
3) There is a restriction of only using such images which are smaller than 5 MB.
4) While loading only the image gets optimized.
5) Fully supports bulk optimization.
6) Supports known image formats like JPG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and TIF.
e) Imagify
It is a powerful tool that turns any WordPress-based website into the Image-optimized one. This ultimately decreases the loading time and improves the performance of the website overall.
Features:
1) Create backup of the original images.
2) Supports different and known image formats like WebP, PDF, GIF, JPG, and PNG.
3) Offers different compression levels-Normal, Aggressive, Ultra
4) Available in both, free and paid versions
5) Once the image is uploaded, automatic resizing and optimization is done
6) Supports massive optimization
The combination of Imagify and WP Rocket creates a great and effective combination of performance and speed for any of the websites based on WordPress.
f)Jetpack
It is another very powerful Image compressor tool that combines all the necessary features of the WordPress sites into one. But Marketing, performance, and security levels are the primary things to look for.
Features:
1) Automatically optimize the image
2) Provide images to the visitors using a CDN
3) Reduces the server load and provides faster image loading for the end-users.
4) Free version of the plugin is also available.
g) WP Rocket
It is considered as the best WordPress caching plugin available in the market to date. Some of the major features are given below,
Features:
1) It is very user-friendly for beginners.
2) Speed up your website instantly.
3) Will only load images when viewed, this is called Lazy loading
4) They are the ones who also developed another Image optimization tool called Imagify.
5) It will resize the images on the fly and also restore the images to their original size.
6) Users have full control over the settings of Image compression and optimization.
7) Images are optimized as per the preferences.
h) Optimole
It is such a plugin of image optimization which helps to remove all the bulky images to speed up the website. Also, it compresses the image of format JPEG and PNG while maintaining their quality and thus visitors can relish the faster load time.
Features:
1) The interface here is quite simple and easy.
2) Performs the Image compression at four levels (automatic, high, medium, low).
3) The loading of the image is quite slow.
4) It utilizes free CDN.
5) It is available to the users in Free and paid forms.
6) Is fully supported by WebP and Retina.
i) Imsanity
It is one of the plugins which allows automatic resizing which releases the tension of optimizing each and every image individually. It also provides the option to specify max width/height and .jpg quality.
Features:
1) Existing Images can be resized by the Bulk resize feature.
2) Resize the images selectively in the Media library (List View).
3) Imsanity requires no actions on the part of the user once it is enabled.
4) WordPress built-in image scaling functions are used by the tool.
5) Allows configuration of max width/height and JPG quality
6) Converts BMP and PNG files to JPG for more savings but only optionally.
7) Allows configuration of max height/width and JPG quality
8) Allows automatic scaling of the uploaded large images to a more suitable size.
j) Compress JPEG and PNG images with TinyPNG
The TinyPNG plugin is actually designed to optimize the two most popular image formats, named PNG and JPEG.
Features:
1) There is no limit for the Image size file.
2) Once the images are uploaded, it automatically gets optimized.
3) Mass optimization of the images is possible here.
4) It works for a number of different sites with one API key.
5) The ability to set a desired height or width of the images which are uploaded.
k) reSmush.it
It provides image size reduction which is based on several advanced algorithms. Here automatically the images are optimized once uploaded and it also allows the bulk optimization for the older images.
Features:
1) The easy-to-use slider gives complete control over the image compression process and the image quality.
2) Allows selecting from the level of optimization for the uploads.
3) Limits the optimization to uploads that are lower than 5MB in size.
4) Individual images can be excluded from the compression in case one needs to add an image in the complete full size.
l)Image optimization for SEO
This plugin definitely helps to resize the images to boost the speed of the website. It also helps to replace the alt tag and title of the images.
Features:
1) It is SEO friendly Image Optimization
2) Compress the size of the image to boost the speed of the website.
3) The interface is quite simple and user-friendly.
4) Multi-site support is available.
5) The dashboard design is quite responsive.
6) Obviously the support priority is given to the Paid customers.
7) The support team is very supportive as well as passionate.
8) It is majorly compatible with all browsers.
9) It is ready to translate and supports being multilingual.
10) Very compatible with most of the themes of WordPress.
CONCLUSION:
The ones which are described above are just a handful of plugins that are easily available on the internet. It is always advised to use one single plugin at a time. All the options have their own comforts and allow Image optimization without hindering the quality of the image. The users can use different plugins as the requirement and their level. Like there is a different plugin for beginners and different for mass optimization. So, one can make the selection of plugins as per the need and experience of the users.