Recently I got a message from Mr. Ajay requesting me to suggest him a good image optimization WordPress plugin. Now the problem was that I couldn’t suggest him any one since I personally use three different plugins. So I decided to create a new post and help out all my readers who are struggling with bad Google page speed grades.
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Image Optimization WordPress Plugins Which You Should Use
You all know that images can help to increase user attention, but you should also know that they can drastically increase your webpage load time. Blogger’s usually add pixel perfect and high quality images to their posts and pages so as to make their article more attractive. But using even a single 600 by 200 pixel .jpg format picture will increase your post load time by approximately 30%.
But do you know, there are certain free tools and services which can help you to compress all your images by up to 90% and that without losing the quality ( depends on the settings ).
Here in this post, you are going to reveal top 5 of those add-ons and online services which will help you save your bandwidth and CDN charges.
EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW can compress, resize and convert almost any type of image. Your images are compressed as your upload them to your server and you also have the option to optimize all your previously uploaded pictures.
It uses multiple open source compression engines like PNGout, JPEGtran and others which help you to compress your images on your dashboard itself. You don’t need to install any additional software nor you have to but any subscription plan. It’s a 100% free software and will run using your server’s resources.
As far as the features are concerned, you get every option which can directly result in optimized picture. You can choose to convert your images into the format which will result in minimum size. You can also opt-in for the lossy PNG compression which will result in less size, but usually lossless compression is perfect option for png format based pictures.
Ewww has one unique feature called bulk optimize which allows you to compress every image in your directory. Their’s one suggestion from my side, use the bulk optimize feature only when you have minimum visitors on your site, since this option needs a whole lot of ram to run.
Kraken
It’s a another add on with lots of amazing features, but its a premium service. I mean in order to use this plugin you need to subscribe to paid membership of kraken and have to use their API, secret key.
Why should you use this service
The basic problem with all optimization plugins are that they all need maximum percentage of your server’s resources. Now if you own a busy website then using any of the compression plugin will result in sluggish website and even suspension of hosting account.
So its better to use premium services which will optimize your images using their server resources and bandwidth. This will result in better performing website.
Features of kraken
- All your images including your post thumbnails are optimized using their server’s ram. This means your website don’t have to handle any kind of load.
- Supported image formats are JPEG, PNG and GIF. Remember that animated GIF when compressed will result in static picture.
- You have option to individually optimize your image.
- The maximum supported file size is 8mb.
CW Image Optimizer WordPress Plugin
CW is based on smush.it service. Smush.it is an image optimization service provided by Yahoo Inc. The only difference between these two addons are that CW optimize your files within your server and smush.it uploads your files to Yahoo server and then download the compressed file on your server.
This means if you are using smush, then you have to agree with Yahoo’s terms and policies, but with CW you don’t need to follow any term and policy.
CW uses Linux-based image optimization tool called littleutils which allows you to losslessly compress your images. Lossless compression means that their won’t be any change in your image quality, just the file size will be reduced.
With the help of CW image optimization plugin you can save your bandwidth, CDN charges and can increase your website’s performance.
Cloudinary A Free Image CDN Service
It’s not just a simple image optimization plugin, but rather its a complete management tool. It allows you to manipulate all your images with its powerfull option panel. You get lots of options to compress, resize, crop and convert your pictures and the best part is that every manipulation is done on cloud based server. This means cloudinary doesn’t use your server’s resources.
Cloudinary also serves as a CDN which means content delivery network. You can register free account and can host all your images and even PDF files on their powerfull servers which are located all around the globe. This means your website or blog will load much faster than before as all your files are distributed all around the globe.
Below I have listed few of its important features :
- Your website loading speed will improve.
- You can crop, resize your pictures.
- With help of advanced options you can add effects, texts, overlays to all your images.
- Cloudinary has face detection system which makes cropping much easier.
- You get options to compress and convert your images to different formats.
- You can convert any page into PDF file and store them on cloud server.
With free plan you will get 500 MB of storage, 1 GB of monthly bandwidth and ability to store up to 50,000 images.
TinyPNG For WordPress
It’s a WordPress plugin which uses the free API from tinypng service to compress only PNG format images. You can also use the official website to perform optimization, but uploading images to tinypng, then downloading them to your local system and then again uploading them to your server becomes a real headache.
In Order to solve this problem this plugin was developed. Unlike any other compression engine, tiny png can compress your 24-bit images into 8-bit indexed color images which are much smaller in size.
These are some of my personal favourite free image optimization wordpress plugins. You can use them to improve your page loading time and user experience.
Imsanity
Do your website has lots of guest authors or contributor. And do they upload lots of images to your server. If so then this plugin will help you to resize all those images to small size with one click and it will save your lots of disk space.
It has a feature named bulk resize and it works perfectly with my server.If you want to have all your images of any specific height and width then this plugin can handle it easily. You have to just to its configuration page and have to set the desired size the fields. Then you have to click on save button and then let it do its task.
It has one optional feature will give you power to convert pictures from BMP format to JPG format.
Advanced lazy load
If you use lots of images in your blog posts then this plugin will help to make your blog post load fast. When your visitor loads any of your article then this plugin allows the text to load first and then it loads the images your visitor scroll down.
You can even enable of disable it’s functionality in mobile devices using it control panel.
Hammy
If you have a responsive website then this image optimization wordpress plugin is must for you. It will help you create multiple copies your images with different sizes which are based on the css view port.
This means that when your website is browsed using 320px screen then your website will load the image with 320px instead of the it’s full width version. This will help to improve user experience for your mobile visitors and will also make your website more fast in small devices.
one of its important feature is that it support retina display screen and will work with every wordpress theme.
Gayatri Mantra says
Hello, thank you for summary but I still don’t know which one is the best… WP.Smush.it is good and simple but does not show me the best results.