In this post, we will know why image optimizer is important for any WordPress website and the most effective WordPress image compression plugins in order to make your website load much faster.
When considering a WordPress website, the important thing to be noted is its speed and performance. None of the people will wait for a website that takes much time to load. So that if there are no visitors, automatically your website goes down and your SEO ranking decreases.
In a WordPress website, image plays a very major role. Just by quality images, it attracts the visitors to your site, but due to the image, your website shouldn’t slow down. When you use high-resolution images on your website, it will obviously take much longer time to load.
Nowadays people used their hand-held devices to open any website. But they don’t want to wait for a long time to load that website. So in order to avoid that situation, WordPress image compression plugins have come into the field. Using this image compression plugins your website will load faster, the user will gain a better experience visiting your site and SEO ranking will increase.
Benefits of using WordPress image Compression Plugins
There are many benefits using these plugins. Once you compress the image, the file size will be reduced before uploading it to your website. At times while compressing images due to software like Photoshop, Picasa etc can reduce the quality of an image and there might be a loss of data for that image. This can be stated as lossy compression. But by using this image compression plugin, none of the content of the image or quality will be lost.
The list of effective 8 best WordPress image compression plugins is given.You can choose any plugin based on your website. Each plugin has its own unique features. Using these plugins, you can optimize images that make your website works effectively.
#1. WP Smush
WP Smush is an award-winning image compression plugin. It seems to be the best plugin for WordPress image compression. This plugin compresses your image and gives an excellent loading speed for your website. It can compress any image formats like JPEG, GIF, and PNG.
The WP Smush plugin uses a variety of algorithms in order to reduce the image size without losing its quality. Any images that exceed its maximum limit of width and depth, it automatically resizes the image when added in the media library. It uses an advanced lossless compression technique.
This technique is mainly used to compress the image without losing its quality. In this plugin, you can compress each individual image or can be processed in a bulk. All these compressions can be done is just in single click.
It is one of the simplest image compression plugin. This plugin is available in both free as well as pro version. But in a free version, you will be able to use image size to 1MB only. If your image size is high, then it is better to go for pro version.
In pro version, you can use an image size of up to 32MB and even there is a lossy compression technique in pro version. This plugin is compatible with media library plugins like NextGen gallery, WPMP, WP all import, WP media folder, WPML, WP Retina 2x, WP offload S3 and many more.
#2. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW image optimizer plugin automatically optimizes your image while uploading. It uses the lossless compression technique so that your image quality won’t be compromised. Here you can even compress the images which are previously uploaded to your website.
This plugin helps to give you the best quality image without losing any data in the image. It makes your website load faster. So that the Google ranking of your website will increase. This plugin improves your storage space and bandwidth.
Even if you upload a high pixel image, you need not worry about it. This plugin makes sure to give you the best-optimized image. One important advantage of this plugin is it starts the optimization process on the server, rather than connecting to the third party. This makes the optimization faster and you can optimize as much as the image you want in few minutes.
EWWW image optimizer plugin supports image formats like JPG, GIF, and PNG. The benefits of this plugin include Smooth handling, high torque, no speed size and you will be able to upload unlimited file size, adaptive steering, comprehensive coverage etc.
There are free as well as premium version. If you need additional features, then it is better to opt for the premium version. This plugin supports media library plugins like NextGen, GRAND Flash gallery, NextCellent etc.
#3. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel image optimizer is also one of the best WordPress image compression plugin. You will be able to optimize bulk images using this plugin. This plugin is very user-friendly, comprehensive and light-weight.
This plugin uses only minimum resources and works well in Shared, Dedicated and VPS web hosting. For using ShortPixel you have to register your email address and get the API key before you start working on it. This plugin will compress your image as well as PDF files without losing its original quality.
You have to just upload your images to your media library, now this plugin will send the images to the ShortPixel cloud server. Then the cloud server will use a technique called crunching which you have enabled while activating this plugin on your website.
After crunching technique is done, the cloud server will return back the optimized image back to your media library. You can keep both the original image and compressed image in your library. This plugin supports JPG, GIF, PNG and even PDF formats. It will automatically handle everything from the cloud.
ShortPixel uses advanced lossless and lossy compression techniques so that you get the best-compressed images. You get up to 90% compression rate with this plugin. This plugin is absolutely free, but you need cloud service to connect with it.
You can even get cloud service plan for free, but in the free version, you can optimize only 100 images per month so that it might not be great for large websites. This plugin comes with numerous features. You can easily convert to any image format you want.
#4. Imsanity
Imsanity seems to be one of the favorite resizing plugins for WordPress users. It compresses your image with the best quality. This plugin will automatically resize your image even if it exceeds the limit.
You can compress bulk images with this plugin without any delay and quality. It has best optimization features. You can even specify the maximum scales of images. The additional feature in this plugin is you can convert BMP to JPG files. You can resize the previously uploaded images on your website. In that, you can even select the images and resize it.
This plugin is available in many languages, you can easily download this plugin and start using it. Imsanity support image formats like JPG, GIF, PNG etc. It gives you a perfect image resize even bulk image is been compressed.
This plugin saves your bandwidth and storage space. It gives you a simplified workflow, gives you a complete backup of your image, need not work for large image size, saves your time by uploading and resizing bulk images automatically.
Imsanity is simple to use as well as a very effective plugin. It has a built-in image scaling functions. This plugin is free and easy to download. Anyone can make use of this plugin.
#5. Compress JPEG & PNG Images
Compress JPEG & PNG plugin helps to optimize your image with compromising its quality. It gives you the exact quality of the original image. It loads your website faster by compressing the JPEG and PNG images.
This plugin offers only lossy compression technique. This plugin is developed by the team TinyPNG. There are mainly two online compression tools available, they are TinyPNG and TinyJPG. This compress JPEG & PNG plugin integrates with this online tool and gives you a compressed image.
The process is very simple, you just have to register and get the API key to start working on it. This plugin will resize the images uploaded in the media library, the images will be processed through TinyPNG or TinyJPG and then the compressed image is given back to your media library.
All the images are compressed automatically, you need not worry about the image resize and its quality. You can easily resize the previously stored images or any new images in the media library. Even bulk image resizing is done effectively.
Here you have an option of setting the maximum width and height of resizing the original image. If your original images exceed the limit, it automatically resizes your image without any quality loss. Using TinyPNG server, it can optimize your images to 50-80% and by using TinyJPG server, the image can be optimized to 40-60%.
You can use the free service, but you can upload and resize 100 images per month. You also have a feature of having the copyright for creation date, GPS location in original images and metadata. This plugin is compatible with WP Retina 2x, WP offload, WooCommerce etc. you can even convert the CMYK to RGB in order to save maximum space and compatibility.
#6. Imagify Image Optimizer
Imagify Image Optimizer is an online compression tool integrated with WordPress. You can compress the image automatically through this plugin without losing the quality of your image.
It compresses all the new images from your media library and even the previously stored images. Here you can even compress bulk images with no loss of time and image quality. Its most important task is to speed up your website with better quality images.
This plugin is developed by the team of WP-Rocket plugin which is a well known caching plugin. Every image will automatically optimize including the retina images and thumbnails. This plugin offers three different compressions and you can choose one which is apt for your website.
They are Normal, Aggressive and Ultra. In normal compression, lossless algorithm is used, so that the image quality will never change. Next, in aggressive compression, you have a lossy algorithm, here some quality might reduce, but it won’t be that visible. The third one is Ultra compression, this method uses the strongest lossy compression algorithm.
But if your not satisfied with any methods, you can easily backup your image and restore it to original size. There is a free service to use this plugin, you just have to create an account and get the API key.
In free service, you can upload and resize up to 2 MB images per month. If your website requires more images to upload, then you can go for the paid version. In the paid version, there is no file size.
It gives you an additional feature that if you don’t want to go for a monthly plan, and if you need some bandwidth alone, you can easily pay, and get it. This plugin supports image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF. It is compatible with NextGEN and WooCommerce.
#7. reSmush.it Image Optimizer
reSmush.it Image Optimizer is best in the market for optimization images. It is a free image optimizer plugin. This plugin will automatically take the images from your media library, compresses it and then sends back the compressed image to your library.
This image optimization plugin is based on reSumsh.it API. It not only compresses the new and upcoming images, it even compresses the older images in your library. This plugin gives you the best quality even after compressing the image.
You can even do bulk image resizing just with two simple clicks. This plugin uses several algorithms for image resizing. So that you need not worry about the quality of the resized image. This plugin works effectively in many CMS like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.
It can support image formats like JPG, PNG, and GIF. In this plugin, you can even select the optimized stage for your upload. This plugin doesn’t have different compression levels. You can upload and resize images up to 5 MB. The plugin web service is free and you need not depend upon any third party. You can even exclude some images which you don’t want to optimize.
#8. Resize Image After Upload
Resize Image After Upload, as the name suggests, this plugin will resize all your images once it is uploaded. This plugin considered a user-friendly plugin. It is free, comprehensive, and regularly updated plugin which helps in resizing your image.
It gives you the best quality image even after resizing it. This plugin will automatically resize your images once it is upload by setting a predefined maximum width and height for the images. Resize image after upload plugin supports formats like GIF, JPEG, and PNG. This plugin is completely free and safe to use.
Since it optimizes the image, it saves you lot of space and bandwidth on the server. It gives you a complete compressed image without compromising its quality at any cost. This plugin has an additional feature that you can PNG images to JPEG, even if the transparent layer is missing in the PNG file.
This plugin will force for re-compressing JPEG images. Resize image after upload plugin is a standard one, you can just try out and have a good experience. Making use of this plugin reduces your time and your website speed will automatically increase.
Wrapping up:
WordPress image compression is a key factor for any WordPress website. It makes your website faster and increases your Google ranking. These plugins give you a complete optimized image without compromising its quality. Each plugin comes with its own features. It’s just your need of choosing a plugin for your WordPress website.
As mentioned all the above plugins are worth using it. It saves your space as well as bandwidth. Hope you got an idea about WordPress image compression plugins. If you have any queries please feel free to comment us. Your comments are most awaited in order to improve our article. You can subscribe us on Facebook and Twitter.