Images are significant part of your website as they engage visitors and ultimately drive traffic to your site. But, the large size images can make your website’s loading speed slower. Today, a larger number of people are using smartphones and tablets to browse the websites. They hate to wait for a site that takes more time to load. Thus, it’s better to increase the loading time of website before you lose your visitors.
Image optimization is a technique used to reduce the files size of images. It does not only help your web pages load faster but also boost your Search Engine Optimization. Google and other search engines give high preference to the websites that load faster. Many developers use large images without knowing the right file size required by a particular theme they use. However, it is necessary to understand your WordPress theme and the image sizes which should be used on your website.
Here are some of the best WordPress image optimization plugins that will help you optimize the images on your WordPress website:
WP Smush
This is the fastest yet user-friendly image compression plugin that widely used for WordPress. It allows you to compress PNG, GIF, and JPEG images up to 32MB. You can even optimize the pictures individually or in bulk using while using WP Smush. The plugin strips metadata from JPEG files, converts GIFs to indexed PNGs, and removes the unused colors from indexed images. Moreover, you can set up “automated smushing” that will automatically compress all the new pictures uploaded to your website. WP Smush is also compatible with WP Retina 2x and NextGEN Gallery for using quality image display with the smallest file size.
EWWW Image Optimizer
This plugin is known as the best image optimization plugin used in WordPress development. It automatically optimizes the pictures as you upload them to your website. You can also optimize the images that you have previously added. It is easy to optimize the images in real-time by installing EWWW Image Optimizer on WordPress as a plugin. It converts your images to the file format that allows the smallest image size while applying lossy reductions for PNG images.
SEO Friendly Images
The images are provided relevant names that boost your search engine optimization and ultimately increase the traffic to your website. Images with appropriate names will be more likely to be appeared in Google and other search engines. It can be achieved by adding a keyword into the image title. This plugin edits your images with the most appropriate ALT and TITLE attributes that automatically helps boost your search engine optimization. If your pictures don’t have TITLE and ALT already included, “SEO Friendly Images” adds them in all according to the options you choose.
CW Image Optimizer
CW Image Optimizer is a widely-used plugin that automatically optimizes your pictures. It uses the Linux little utils image optimization tools that make it best image optimization plugins for WordPress. With CW Image Optimizer, your pictures won’t lose quality during the optimization. It is quite similar to the WP Smush.it plugin, but it uses Linux image optimizing programs thus your image doesn’t leave your server.
PB Responsive Images
This amazing plugin automatically reformats your pictures into a format which is similar to the image tag proposed. Each image is re-formatted according to SLIR query pairs and standard CSS media queries. PB Responsive Images also provides shortcodes so you can customize the queries used per image and used per post. It also helps you get fully-optimized yet responsive images for the different screen sizes.
The file sizes of the pictures significantly affect the loading speed of your web page. If these images are compressed to be a lower file size, this will boost up the speed up your website. Before start using all these plugins, you should ensure that you are giving relevant names to the images.
