WordPress image optimization plugins are essential for every WordPress website. They can decrease page load times, improve user experience, and help you rank better in search engines. Images can make your website look more professional, but if you don’t optimize the size of WordPress images, it will slow down your website.
WordPress is one of the most popular CMSs out there, powering more than 30% of all websites on the Internet. So it’s no surprise that people are constantly looking for ways to make their WordPress sites run faster.
If your images aren’t compressed or optimized for the web, they could be slowing down your page loads and affecting user experience and your Google ranking. In this post, we’ll cover the 10 best free WordPress image optimization plugins that will help you speed up your website without any coding skills.
What is image compression?
Image compression is the process of reducing a digital image’s file size without appreciably degrading the image quality for easier storage and faster transmission.
Choose the right format for your images
Optimizing your images is essential for achieving a good user experience and improving SEO. A poorly optimized image can bring your site down. But how do you know which format to choose? It’s JPEG and WebP.
Don’t use too many images
Did you know that the majority of your website’s visitors spend just 30 seconds on each page? If your website’s content is rich in images, then people will have a good reason to stay longer. But, that doesn’t mean you should use too much media content because it can be a bad user experience and slow down your site speed. Below are the 10 best free image optimization WordPress plugins to improve your WP site speed.
1. Smush
Smush is a WordPress plugin that reduces image file size without losing quality. It can reduce web page load time and save bandwidth, especially if website images are large. It uses a lossless compression algorithm that does not cause any degradation to the original image’s quality.
With Smush, you can automatically compress and optimize images as you upload them to your website. It also compresses images that are already uploaded to your site. It comes in both free and paid versions, and the free version already packs a lot of punch.
2. Optimole
Optimizing your images can reduce the size of your pages by up to 80%. It also has a positive impact on your search engine ranking and can increase conversion rates. Optimole helps you get higher scores on Google Page Speed Insights, GTmetrix, or any other performance testing tools.
Optimole is a free WordPress plugin that optimizes your images and serves them via a fast CDN. It makes your website load faster and saves you bandwidth. With this plugin, you are able to optimize all your images, including those hosted externally.
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3. ShortPixel
Shortpixel is a plugin that optimizes images sent to your WordPress site. The plugin has support for JPG, PNG, and GIF files, as well as PDF documents. ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a plugin that optimizes images automatically, in the background. If you’re using WordPress, go ahead and give it a try!
The ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin works on all WordPress-generated thumbnails. If you have an image gallery or stock photos, the plugin will compress both the original upload and the resized versions.
4. EWWW
EWWW Image Optimizer is the most popular image optimization plugin for WordPress. It will automatically optimize your images and convert them to the file format that will produce the smallest image size.
It also has the ability to optimize all images uploaded in the past and optionally convert your images to the best file format. It can convert PNG, JPG, and GIF to WebP. If you have existing images that need compression, use the EWWW Optimizer to optimize all your images with a single click.
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5. Imagify
Imagify is the best image optimization plugin for WordPress. It allows you to adjust the level of compression depending on how much optimization you want for your images. You can set it to normal, aggressive, or ultra. You can use this plugin to reduce the size of the images on your website by up to 70%.
However, before doing that, you need to create an account in order to change the compression level. Imagify also provides a WebP format option for even more savings if you already use WebP on your website.
6. Sirv
Sirv Image optimization plugin optimizes images sent from your WordPress website to the Sirv CDN. When an image is requested, it is first compressed and resized on-the-fly using Sirv’s S3 infrastructure. Using Sirv you can generate 360° spin animations and easily turn a set of photos into a 3D product spin animation that can be viewed on any device.
Image optimization reduces file sizes, improves page speed, and reduces bandwidth costs. Optimize images on upload – automatically resize, watermark, and compress images of any size to make your site faster, easier to manage, and more secure.
7. reSmush.it
The reSmush.it is a unique plugin because it optimizes images using a third-party service, allowing you to optimize your entire media library at once instead of one image at a time. The plugin makes it easy to compress all of your existing images and automatically compress new images as they’re uploaded.
Lossless allows you to resize images without losing their original quality, while lossy allows you to resize images with little loss in quality, resulting in much smaller file sizes. This is a really nice plugin to reduce the file size of your JPEG and PNG images without losing quality.
8. Robin image optimizer
Robin image optimizer plugin helps you to optimize images on your WordPress website. It supports lossless and lossy image optimization, automatically converts PNG to JPEG, WebP support, optionally auto-converts JPEGs to WebP, and has no file size limit.
The images are optimized automatically in the background by the Robin Cloud platform when they are uploaded to your website or any time later when you choose to. It’s a small WordPress plugin with a big impact, lightweight and easy to set up. It can optimize all your images in one go, or you can optimize images individually as you upload them.
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9. WebP Converter
The WebP converter plugin allows you to bulk optimize images in JPEG or PNG format using WebP conversion and lossy compression. The plugin also resizes images during the process and can convert them to the WebP format. You can also use it to restore original images from backups, migrate data from one site to another, and even convert all media directly during upload.
The WebP Converter plugin is the best way to optimize your images and speed up your website. The WebP Converter uses the WebP image format, which provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
10. Highcompress Image Compressor
Highcompress Image Compressor is a nice free image compressor WordPress plugin. It allows you to optimize your images with a few clicks, and it automatically compresses images as you upload them to your website.
Highcompress has been designed to be as easy to use as possible, so it requires no configuration at all. Just install and activate the plugin, then start optimizing your existing images by clicking on Bulk Optimize, or you can optimize images as they are uploaded by checking the Auto Optimize option.
Conclusion
The above plugins should give you a good starting point for image optimization. But remember always keep testing and updating, as things may change in the near future.
