There is a major parameter that Google is always looking into, Yes! the user experience and website speed. When the loading time is lesser and higher users prefer to stick with you.
Within 4 second is always permissible to get into the race. If you got below 2s then you are an achiever and caring reader.
But How can you make your site even faster with images? Because these contents are the major culprits for loading in a larger time.
1000 words can talk with a single image.So as to increase readability we have to use the images. If our landing page consists of larger images then the size of the images to be taken care of.
If the compression technique is automatic, then maintaining your website is ever easy.
Yes, Here I would like to share how to automate the image compression by means of WordPress plugins.
In this article, I am discussing the best 5 image optimizer plugins for your WordPress website. Yes, good handful plugins mainly designed for image compressions, lazy loading, image resizing, abnormal size detection, etc.They will provide you great flexibility for managing the image size.
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After reading this article you will get answers to these questions.
- How to speed up your WordPress website?
- How important is image compression for any website?
- What are the plugins used for compressing images?
- What is the price of each plugin if you are going for the pro version?
- What is the Major feature list of image compression plugins in WordPress?
- What are the best plugins for WordPress image optimization?
These plugins are not a big deal to configure. It is very easy to automate the compression of JPG or PNG while you upload. The changes you can view through the GTmatrix.com or Google page speed tester.
Here I am talking about the WordPress website speed that is caused by the bulky images. There are a number of reasons for delayed loading. That will be discussed later.
Let’s look into the advantages of WordPress image optimization plugins
- It will Improve your page speed
- The thumbnails are taken care of by the image optimization plugins
- They resize the images automatically
- Really a time saver
- A non-technical person can handle the image compression tasks
I can show you how significantly reducing the page size by using the plugin for my sample site in WordPress. I have used the free version of the GeneratePress theme, which is lightweight and most popular for blog development.
Without any images and such posts the web page itself has 29.7Kb and the page is loading within 2s, which is definitely an amazing loading time.
After uploading the images to the post and features image, the size of the web page becomes 210Kb.
I have applied the Smush WordPress plugin for optimizing my images and then take a look, the plugin has done its job.
The page size becomes 128Kb. The page loading time did not reflect that much, because I am working on raw WordPress website, which has no posts and no customization made yet.
So get into the general idea of wp image optimizer plugins.
| Plugin Name | Original Size | Size After Optimization | Optimization Percentage | Type of Compression |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Imagify | 500 KB | 111.5 KB | 77.70% | Lossy |
| TinyPNG | 500 KB | 132.5 KB | 73.50% | Lossy |
| ShortPixel | 500 KB | 150.2 KB | 69.96% | Lossy |
| Smush | 500 KB | 250.0 KB | 50.00% | Lossless |
| Ewww | 500 KB | 139.5 KB | 72.10% | Lossy |
Quick findings on how much these plugins have downloaded and user ratings
| Plugin Name | Total Downloads | Ratings out of 5 (As per WordPress.org) |
|---|---|---|
| Smush | 1M+ | 4.8 |
| EWWW Image Optimizer | 800,000+ | 4.7 |
| Imagify | 300,000+ | 4.5 |
| Compress JPEG & PNG images | 200,000+ | 4.5 |
| ShortPixel Image Optimizer | 200,000+ | 4.6 |
5 best Image optimizer plugins for WordPress
Table of Contents
Smush
Smush made some buzz on the WordPress ecosystem That’s why we see the 1 Million users with 4.8 ratings out of 5. So it’s worth introducing Smush into first place. The Smush wins 2018 image madness and they were tested a number of benchmarks and keep users intact with them by delivering the quality.
Smush compares the images and compresses effectively without losing the visible quality of the image. They
Optimize your images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
Now coming into the top features of Smush image optimizer plugin.
- Lossless Compression – Compress unused data without affecting image quality
- Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your page speed
- Directory Smush – Optimize and shrink images even if they are not located in the media library
- Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks
- Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload
Pro version consists of these additional features
- 2x Compression
- Bulk smush unlimited images
- Smush Pro CDN
- Backup original images
- Automatic resize & scale
- WebP support
- Auto-convert PNG to JPEG
- Large images up to 32MB
- Custom loading Included Lazy load animation
The price of Smush WordPress plugin
Smush Pro pricing plan – $6/monthly/site
$49/year/site – massive discount and free for 3 months while in a year plan
EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW image optimizer is the other plugin which has come to the list of best WordPress plugins for image compression. This plugin will boost your WordPress website by compressing the images in a noticeable percentage.
Other major optimizer plugins are using API keys for communicating with external servers for compressing the images. This process takes a little more time to get compressed. But EWWW has come up with another idea that the compression will work inside a hosted server and use their resources, which means the images are compressed faster.
Hence you can compress unlimited images for free.
- They also have API based compression and cloud integration which is providing a paid plan.
- Now we can see the features of the EWWW image optimizer.
- Unlimited image compression
- Compressing speed is less
- best compression/quality ratio available with their lossy options for JPG, PNG, and PDF files.
- It will handle other than WordPress image gallery
- original Image backup stores for long 30 days
- Automatic image compression
- Bulk options even for previously uploaded images
- Keeps separate database for optimized images so re-optimize don’t come
- Wp-CLI integration
Features of paid plans
- Premium Compression
- WebP (next-gen image format)
- Save Storage Space
- Reduced Server Load
Additional to the above Easy IO customer will get these features.
- Image Resizing/Scaling
- One-click Optimization
- Faster Delivery (CDN)
- Reduced Server Load to maximum
- Compressed Images Stored on their Servers
There are 2 paid offers available for EWWW users.
Compress with API key – $0.002 / image
Easy IO – $5-15 / month
Imagify
Imagify image compression plugin is the product of WP Media. After their successful launch of WProcket, they introduced Imagify in 2016. Imagify has 3 modes of operation for image compression ( Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra) according to the level of compression.
WebP images can also compress with Imagify and Woo-commerce with NextGen gallery compatible. If we see other plugins doing the compression as a number of images, they change as the total size of the images. You have to pay for 1GB images to compress from Imagify in a month.
See the key features of Imagify image compression plugin.
- Normal, a lossless compression algorithm. The image quality won’t be altered at all.
- Aggressive, a lossy compression algorithm. Stronger compression with a tiny loss of quality most of the time this is not even noticeable at all.
- Ultra, our strongest compression method using a lossy algorithm.
- Automatic image compression
- Backup of your original images
- Also include the folders outside image gallery
- Serves webP format automatically even the images are in JPG or PNG formats
- 25MB images will convert for unlimited websites in the free plan
Pricing of Imagify
- 25MB/Month is free
- Lite – 1GB /of data per month – $4.99
- Basic – 2GB – $8.99
- Standard 5GB – $19.99
- Plus – 15GB – $39.99
- Enterprise -50GB – $69.99
Compress JPEG & PNG images
The Compress JPEG & PNG image is developed by the Tinypng team by offering an online compression platform also.
There are hassle-free image compression offers by the plugin Compress JPEG & PNG. It allows you to automatically compass the images without losing quality while uploading.
Features of Compress JPEG & PNG images
- Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library.
- Optimize individual images already in your media library.
- Display JPEG images more quickly with progressive JPEG encoding.
- Choose to preserve copyright metadata, creation date, and GPS location in your original images.
- Supports compression of animated PNG.
- WooCommerce compatible
- Dashboard widget with your total savings.
- Optimize and resize uploads with the WordPress mobile app.
- No file size limits.
Pricing of Compress JPEG & PNG images – 1 user $25/ year
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Short Pixel Image Optimizer is another best choice for image compression for WordPress websites. They have 2 Lac+ active installations with 4.6 ratings. ShortPixel comes with some interesting features in the image optimization category and they are supporting JPG, PNG, GIF, and WebP plus PDF files. The glossy JPG compression that makes the image more reduced size without altering the quality of visual, which is specially designed for photographers. The reduced image content size results in the improvement in the loading of websites or blogs and increased user experience.
Major features of ShortPixel Image Optimizer
- Automatic image compression
- JPG, PNG, GIF converts into Webp format
- Automatic option for converting large image PNG to JPG format
- Option for using the Webp images to the front end by using the tag
- Options for optimizing the outside of an image gallery like NextGen gallery.
- Will avoid already compressed images.
- You can run ShortPixel plugin on multiple websites or on a multisite with a single API Key
- Bulk Optimize supports
- Works with Woocommerce websites.
- No file size limit
- Directly integrates with Cloudflare either by using token or API keys
- lossy/glossy/lossless
ShortPixel pricing plan
Free 100 images/month
Short 5000images/month 4.99
Large 12000 images/month – 9.99
XXL 55000 images/month – 29.99
Which WordPress image optimizer should you use?
The above said each plugin their own peculiarity and always preserving the image quality to great extent. If we aggressively reduce the image size, some may show color blurring and pixelation. Here we can see the Imagify, EWWW, TinyPNG, have more compression rated compared to other plugins. The interface and usability are matter for selecting the optimizer plugins. If you want a free version then go for EWWW and it is the right option to work with. The simple plugin with notable pricing will have the ShortPixel.
What I mean is that the plugins here listed have their own feature sets and pro versions are giving additional support. So let’s identify your requirements and choose wisely.
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