How to Perfectly Optimize Images for Your WordPress Website
Images are a significant part of a web page as they drive more traffic to your site. Image Optimization is essential for WordPress site performance and SEO ranking. Large images slow down your web pages and use more storage on your server. And, there is nothing more annoying than waiting for a website to load. Consequently, this will frustrate the visitors and they end up moving to your competitors offering better performance.
Image source: Pixabay
Therefore, if you don’t go for image optimization, it will increase the bounce rate to a great extent and have a negative impact on the search engine rankings. But when it comes to WordPress, it makes image optimization very easy with its different ways to do it.
While considering that you have a great WordPress site set up and hosting, let’s have a look at different ways with which you can effectively optimize images on your site:
1. Choose the Right Image Format
When using image editing software, you can save images in a number of different file types. The most commonly used file formats are the JPEG with .jpg extension and PNG with .png extension.
The best format for WordPress is JPEG as it is better suited for images with a huge variety of colors and gradients. Moreover, it takes comparatively less time to load and less space than other known formats. JPEG is quite suitable for product images and blog posts.
On the other hand, PNG is best for computer-generated images and vector graphics such as logos, buttons, screenshots, etc., and greatly supports transparency, unlike JPEG. However, it should be used less as it consumes a lot of space and increases the page loading time.
2. Resize Your Images
Another great method to optimize images on your WordPress site is to resize (downsize) the images before uploading them. Reduce the size of the images to your desired size, and you’ll find browsers and networks thankful to you. But if you don’t resize the large images, you’ll end up with an extremely slow website. With the Imsanity WordPress plugin, you can automatically edit and resize large images. To resize images with this plugin, you’ll need to follow these steps:
Resize Your Images with Imsanity
- Firstly, you need to install and activate the Imsanity plugin.
- Go to Settings > Imsanity to configure the plugin.
- On the new page, you can define the height and width of images that are uploaded to the post/page. Also, you can adjust the size of images that are uploaded straight to the Media Library, and uploaded for Theme options.
- Select the JPG image quality you want it compressed to.
- Select Yes/No for the conversion options: BMP to JPG and PNG to JPG.
- Once you have adjusted the settings, hit the Save Changes
Image source: WordPress
Imsanity will automatically begin resizing all your large images to your desired sizes set up previously.
3. Compress Your Images
Once you have finished resizing the images, you can further reduce the file size by compressing them. With this method, you can effectively save a lot of space. There are two different ways to compress the images. You can either use the online image compression tool or WordPress plugins.
3.1. Compress Images using Online Image Compression Tools
There are numerous tools available online like ImageSmaller, ImageOptim, Optimizilla, etc. to compress the images to minimum possible size. The most famous tool, Optimizilla lets you compress 20 images at a time and set the compression level for every image. To compress images using this tool, here are the steps:
Compress Images using Optimizilla
- Access this page: https://imagecompressor.com/.
- Select your desired image and upload it. The tool will then start compressing the image instantly.
- On the bottom of the page, adjust the slider to settle on a rate of optimization.
- Click the Apply
- Click the Download All button to download the compressed images.
3.2. Compress Images using WordPress Plugins
Not every user is comfortable with online tools as it requires to go through some additional steps. Those who prefer having everything at a single place can use WordPress image compression plugins. With these plugins, you can optimize the images during the upload process without performing any extra work.
When it comes to WordPress image optimization plugins, there are many quality plugins like Imagify, TinyPNG, WP Smush, etc. However, the most popular and best plugin is ShortPixel that uses advanced compression technology to reduce image size. Following are the steps to use it:
Compress Images using ShortPixel
- Install and activate ShortPixel WordPress plugin.
- Go to Settings > ShortPixel.
Image source: WordPress
- Enter your email address in the Request an API Key box and click on Request Key button.
- Once the page reloads, the API key will be added automatically and sent to you via email.
- Configure ShortPixel settings as per your choice. For detailed steps, visit this page.
- After the configuration, ShortPixel starts optimizing every image you upload to your Media Library.
- To bulk optimize the older images on your site, go to Media > Bulk Shortpixel.
- Click on Start Optimizing button to begin the compression of all the old images on your site.
Final Thoughts
The network is growing faster and becoming more advanced. In this article, the importance of image optimization has been discussed, and different methods are shared to optimize images for your WordPress site.
If you want to avoid unnecessary hassle, you can use WordPress image compression plugins for the best experience. Those who are willing to pay some amount for image compression can try ShortPixel. This WordPress plugin comes with a paid monthly plan packed with advanced features. And if you are not in favor of spending money, you can always go for free online tools like Optimizilla that compresses the image before you upload them.
But always follow the right techniques to improve the user experience and boost your WordPress site SEO. Good Luck!
