One of the most important things to do on your blog that will increase your overall performance and also save displays is Image Optimization. This plays a huge role in rankings as well as user experience. Think of it as this way: when you find an answer to your question in Google and click on that link, you expect to go straight to the content fast to read it. Waiting over 5 to 8 seconds for the page to load is annoying and that visitor will just leave and not come back.
Speed is important and you see a lot of bloggers talking about pagespeed. Today I would like to mention image optimization plugins; this type of plugin basically compress your image so it’s small in size without compromising the quality, thus saving you disk space on your web host and increase the loading speed of the page.
I have picked 4 plugins that are very good, some are free with paid options and some are paid plugins.
4 Premium Image Optimization Plugins
This is the plugin that we are currently using and you can see screenshots of this plugin in our Short Pixel tutorial. This plugin (paid version) is excellent and efficiently reduces the size of images. Here are the statistics:
Here are the statistics:
I would not recommend the free version as it is far less quality. The package prices are cheap. Visit their homepage to learn a lot more.
Smush is a free plugin with the option of upgrading but I have found the free version is suitable enough. You can see how much you have saved on compression and space on the plugin settings homepage.
There are some settings you can control with this free plugin.
Here is a video that includes more information on Smush Image Compression.
- 3. Kraken.io
Kraken is both a free and a paid image optimization plugin. You’ll have to determine if you want to invest or not. I’d suggest test out the free version before investing money.
Here are some features that caught my eye:
- Dedicated Infrastructure
- Image Resizing
- No Vendor Lock-In
- Event Callbacks via Webhooks
- Kraken.io Cloud Storage
- Intelligent Lossy Optimization
- WordPress and Magento Plugins
- Optimization Statistics
As of April 16th, 2017, WPOutcast is currently using the Optimus plugin. We upgraded to a paid package as I saw the need to but the free version is just as good. So far, I like this plugin and it really does optimize the images plus does other stuff in the backend you don’t really need to know about. Here are the features.
- Progressive JPEGs
- Reduction of file size during the upload
- Optimization of all preview images of a photo
- No adjustments to code necessary
- Optional: no removal of EXIF and IPTC metadata
- Optional: HTTPS connection for the image transfer (Optimus HQ)
- Optional: conversion to the WebP image format (Optimus HQ)
- Optional: Disable automatic optimization during upload process
- Optimized for WordPress Mobile Apps and Windows Live Writer
- More advantageous PageSpeed, influencing the Ranking Factor
- Faster load times for blog pages
- Support for WooCommerce
- WordPress multisite-support
- Bulk optimization (optimize existing images)
- Optimize images generated by WP Retina 2x (incl. conversion to WebP)
A look at the settings page:
Whoops, I need to run the optimizer 1 more time as I have 1 image not optimized. The bulk feature takes time to run when you first install the plugin. Don’t close the browser window while it’s running, open a new browser tab to do other stuff so the bulk feature continues to run.
Plugin is awesome so far. I have nothing bad to say about it. A friend told me to look at this plugin and I ended up installing it and upgrading.
Carefully review these suggested plugins and see which one suites your needs. Let me know if you need help with the Short Pixel one.
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