WordPress Image Optimization Plugins to Speed Up Your Site

I looked at measures for improving page speed. One of these measures was optimizing images.

High-resolution images that are unnecessarily large in file size can drastically slow down page speed. Why waste resources and time when it’s possible to reduce image size without losing its quality?

This round-up of plugins includes tools for compression and SEO. I’ve also thrown in a couple of lazy load plugins for good measure.

Now: I have used them all in different projects they all good and have similar features they all free and is important to have at least one of them making your pictures smaller you diced which is best for you.

Optimizing your images not only helps your WordPress site load faster but can also boost your SEO.

Let’s kick off this list with WP Smush, which is easily the fastest, most user-friendly and best-performing image compression plugin for WordPress.

WP Smush lets you compress JPEG, GIF and PNG images up to 32MB individually or in bulk using our dedicated smushing servers.

The plugin work by stripping metadata from JPEG files, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the unused colors from indexed images.

With WP Smush, you can set up automated smushing so all of your new images are automatically compressed when uploaded to your site. WP Smush is also compatible with NextGEN Gallery and WP Retina 2x for high-quality image display with the smallest possible file size.

Still not convinced? Site performance tool GTmetrix.com recommends WP Smush as one of its default optimization tips for WordPress sites.

EWWW Image Optimizer

The EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. It can optimize the images that you have already uploaded, convert your images automatically to the file format that will produce the smallest image size (make sure you read the WARNINGS), and optionally apply lossy compression to achieve huge savings for PNG and JPG images.

Why use EWWW Image Optimizer?

1. Your pages will load faster. Smaller image sizes means faster page loads. This will make your visitors happy, and can increase revenue.
2. Faster backups. Smaller image sizes also means faster backups.
3. Less bandwidth usage. Optimizing your images can save you hundreds of KB per image, which means significantly less bandwidth usage.
4. Super fast. The plugin can run on your own server, so you don’t have to wait for a third party service to receive, process, and return your images. You can optimize hundreds of images in just a few minutes. PNG files take the longest, but you can adjust the settings for your situation.
5. Best JPG optimization. With TinyJPG integration, nothing else comes close (requires an API subscription).
6. Best PNG optimization. You can use pngout, optipng, and pngquant in conjunction. And if that isn't enough, try the powerful TinyPNG option.
7. Root access not needed Pre-compiled binaries are made available to install directly within the WordPress folder, and cloud optimization is provided for those who cannot run the binaries locally.
8. Optimize everything With the wp_image_editor class extension, and the ability to specify your own folders for scanning, any image in WordPress can be optimized.

CW Image Optimizer

The CW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. It can also optimize the images that you have already uploaded in the past.

Because CW Image Optimizer uses lossless optimization techniques, your image quality will be exactly the same before and after the optimization. The only thing that will change is your file size.

The CW Image Optimizer plugin is based on the WP Smush.it plugin. Unlike the WP Smush.it plugin, your files won’t be uploaded to a third party when using CW Image Optimizer. Your files are optimized using the Linux littleutils image optimization tools (available for free). You don’t need to worry about the Smush.it privacy policy or terms of service because your images never leave your server.

Why use CW Image Optimizer?

1. Your pages will load faster. Smaller image sizes means faster page loads. This will make your visitors happy, and can increase ad revenue.
2. Faster backups. Smaller image sizes also means faster backups.
3. Less bandwidth usage. Optimizing your images can save you hundreds of KB per image, which means significantly less bandwidth usage.
4. Super fast. Because it runs on your own server, you don’t have to wait for a third party service to receive, process, and return your images. You can optimize hundreds of images in just a few minutes.

Imsanity automatically resizes huge image uploads down to a size that is more reasonable for display in browser, yet still more than large enough for typical website use. The plugin is configurable with a max width, height and quality. When a contributor uploads an image that is larger than the configured size, Imsanity will automatically scale it down to the configured size and replace the original image.

Imsanity also provides a bulk-resize feature to selectively resize previously uploaded images to free up disk space.

This plugin is ideal for blogs that do not require hi-resolution original images to be stored and/or the contributors don't want (or understand how) to scale images before uploading.

Features

• Automatically scales large image uploads to a more "sane" size
• Bulk-resize feature to selectively resize existing images
• Allows configuration of max width/height and jpg quality
• Optionally converts BMP files to JPG so image can be scaled
• Once enabled, Imsanity requires no actions on the part of the user
• Uses WordPress built-in image scaling functions

Translations

Imsanity is available in several languages, each of which will be downloaded automatically when you install the plugin. To help translate it into your language, visithttps://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/imsanity

Optimus - WordPress Image Optimizer

WordPress Image Optimizer

Optimus reduces the file size of uploaded media files lossless. Depending on the image and format, reductions in size of up to 70% are possible. Several kilobytes can be saved per image—these savings contribute positively to the performance of the blog website. What’s most impressive about the compression technology: the quality of the images is maintained—guaranteed.

There are three different versions of Optimus:

1. Optimus (Free) as base version with limitations (e.g. max of 100kb)
2. Optimus HQ (Premium) with expanded functionality for personal projects
3. Optimus HQ PRO (Premium) as professional solution for customer websites

More details about the features and the pricing model on  optimus.io

How does it work?

During the uploading process of images to the media library, the Optimus plugin simultaneously sends the images to the Optimus server, where the incoming material is processed and sent back in optimized form. Afterwards, the Optimus plugin saves the image version with a reduced file size in the media library.

The optimization of images - including thumbnails - is conducted in the background and outside of the view of the user. The image compression gains per file are displayed by Optimus within the media library in form of a percentage value, see screenshot.

Differently from common optimization tools, this WordPress image optimization plugin never alters the quality of images. Instead, superfluous information that is saved by image processing programs and is not even necessary for displaying the image is extracted from image files. This way, the quality of the graphics remains intact while the image size can be reduced significantly. If you wish, Optimus keeps all author, EXIF and copyright information contained within the photos — the compressional gains will be correspondingly lower.

Conclusion

It’s extremely important to optimize the images on your site because images can slow down your site to a huge extent and the image optimization plugins mentioned in this post will help you to optimize your images automatically and speed up your site.

… if you still have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

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