Image optimization will speed up a WordPress site.
The user experience is impacted by a website's loading time in addition to SEO; according to recent studies, 90% of users leave a page that takes longer than 5 seconds to load.
Additionally important to a search engine optimization approach are photos. These will inevitably become more common, and if they are not properly managed, they will cause your site to load slowly.
How to optimize images in WordPress
Imagify's study indicates that photos can reduce a website's loading time by 50%, so maintaining them is crucial. You can perform the optimization manually or with the help of a particular plugin; the former gives you more independence, while the latter helps you to speed things up without compromising quality.
Manual image optimization
We notice that the following techniques are frequently used to manually optimise an image:
the image to the most suitable format, specifically:
- JPEG is an excellent compromise if you want to balance quality and size because it can have two compression modes: lossy and lossless (with or without data loss).
- PNG: this format does not cause data loss, but the images are of greater quality and, naturally, larger in size.
Establishing the maximum image size for your website will prevent you from creating larger images and allow you to resize the image in accordance with the parameters.
Utilize the Compress JPEG tool to compress the file so that it uses less storage space.
Image optimization with plugins and software
If you want to avoid hiring workers, you can rely on WordPress plugins that will optimise photos automatically. We suggest resizing the image using an editing programme in order to further minimise its size before loading. This will prevent you from adding images greater than 2 MB to the WordPress library, as doing so increases the likelihood that you will quickly run out of disc space.
Among the WordPress plugins to optimize images we find:
· Imagify: is the most advanced plugin to resize and compress images in a few moments from the app, from the API or directly from the CMS. It offers the possibility to choose the level of compression, based on the quality you want to obtain, and to restore the images to their original versions if necessary.
· Optimole: represents an all-in-one, cloud-based solution for all needs. With a range of advanced features, this plugin makes it easy to clean up heavy images and process them in real time to make them responsive.
· EWWW Image Optimizer: is the only plugin that allows you to optimize images using server tools (jpegtran, optipng, pngout, pngquant, gifsicle, cwebp); images are automatically compressed, resized to fit the page and device size, loaded and converted to the WebP format.
· ShortPixel Image Optimizer: This is a lightweight and easy to use plugin, capable of compressing all background images and PDF documents with a single click.
· Smush: it is perhaps the most appreciated plugin by the WordPress community; optimizes all images up to 5MB in size without altering their appearance. Smush meticulously scans each image, cleans it of all unnecessary data and resizes it before adding it to the media library.
As an alternative to plugins you can use special editing programs. In addition to the most famous Paint and Photoshop, we point out:
· FileOptimizer : it is a software to optimize files and images without altering their properties. It has advanced compression and optimization techniques and integrates Drag & Drop functionality.
· Paint.NET : is an editing software for Windows. It has an intuitive user interface and very similar to the classic Paint, but with additional features that are still easy to use.
· An An image editor that works on GNU/Linux, macOS, Windows, and other operating systems is called Gimp. It is
· ImageOptim: is a software for iOS, which allows you to manage the size of images while preserving their quality. Removes EXIF metadata, such as GPS location and camera used, so you can post images without exposing private information.
· OptiPNG: compress images without losing any information, with focus on the PNG format.
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