While images are essential for the design of your website, they can have a negative impact on your page loading times. Therefore, you might be looking for an effective way to use high-quality photos while minimizing their effect on your site’s performance.
Fortunately, you can use an image compression plugin to prevent slow loading times. By optimizing the photos on your site, you can use more of them without compromising your site’s performance.
In this post, we’ll briefly discuss what to look for in an image compression plugin. Then, we’ll look at four powerful options and give an overview of their features. Finally, we’ll compress multiple types of images to see which plugin provides the best results. Let’s get started!
Image compression plugins can help you optimize your WordPress images by reducing the size of the files. This means that less data is loaded when a user lands on your website, which can help improve your site’s speed.
Having a fast website is essential for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). By having smaller file sizes, you can improve your First Contentful Paint score. This is one of the primary metrics that Google looks at when ranking a page in search results.
There are a few important things to look for when selecting the best image compression plugin for your site. For instance, you’ll need to see what image file types the plugin supports. Ideally, you’ll want to choose a plugin that is compatible with all formats.
It’s also a good idea to select a plugin that can compress your images in bulk. This can save you a lot of time and effort.
Additionally, you might want to check to see whether the plugin can optimize images that are already on your site. This way, you won’t have to delete your old photos from your Media Library and re-upload them.
As we have seen, compressing the images on your WordPress site can help you improve your page loading times. Now, let’s look at four of the best image compression plugins on the market.
Smush is an all-in-one image optimization plugin. Besides compressing your images, it can also help you further optimize your site with lazy loading and other features. Smush compresses images while preserving their quality. Therefore, you can still have high-resolution photos on your site.
Key Features:
Price: Most of Smush’s features are available in the free plan. For additional configuration options, you’ll need to purchase Smush Pro. Pricing starts at $10.50 per month.
EWWW is an image optimization plugin that lets you compress all images on your WordPress site. It’s also one of the only plugins on the market that optimizes images using the tools on your own server. While this means more technical skills are required, it can also provide more flexibility.
Key Features:
Price: You can use the free version of the plugin. Alternatively, you can purchase one of the premium plans. These start at $7.00 per month.
Imagify is a WordPress plugin that reduces the size of photos on your site without sacrificing quality. It provides multiple compression levels to give you more flexibility. Additionally, it can convert files to the WebP format to further improve results. Unlike many other solutions, Imagify can also optimize PDF file types.
Key Features:
Price: The plugin is free for up to 20MB per month. If you need more than that, you’ll need to purchase the Infinite plan, which starts at $9.99 per month.
WP Compress is a hands-off, autopilot solution for image optimization in WordPress. Once the plugin is set up, no more action is required. It also comes with advanced features such as a centralized management portal and bulk website linking. In addition to compression, it offers WebP conversions, retina device support, and lazy loading.
Key Features:
Price: The plugin is free for up to 100MB per month. Paid plans start at $5.00 and go up to $75.00 per month.
To find out how these plugins compare in terms of compression quality, we’ve conducted some tests with a sample image. This is the photo we’ve used:
The original file size of the image was 738KB. To make the tests fair and consistent, we kept all the plugins on their default settings. Additionally, the results are based on the best compression method that was available in the free plans. We used a PNG, JPEG, and GIF version of the sample photo to check that the tools work consistently for all file types.
Smush produced the smallest amount of improvement. Across the four image types, we discovered that it only reduced the size of media files by an average of six percent. The file size of the JPEG version was 695 KB:
EWWW Image Optimizer had slightly better results than Smush. Media files were reduced in size by around seven percent. EWWW and Smush use similar methods for optimizing images in WordPress, so it makes sense that they would produce very similar results.
The file size of the compressed image was 692 KB:
Imagify offered better results than the previous two options. File size was reduced by an average of 33 percent, without affecting the quality of the image. Perhaps this is because Imagify uses its own dedicated servers, which are specially configured for this purpose.
The compressed image has a file size of 585 KB:
However, WP Compress produced the best results during our tests. It achieved an average file size reduction of 45 percent, with the JPG version of our sample image being reduced by more than half. Like Imagify, WP Compress has a dedicated server for compressing files.
The file size of the compressed image was 399 KB:
WP Compress does not specify whether or not it reduces the quality of images when optimizing them. However, we couldn’t see any noticeable changes in the compressed image.
To recap, our tests found that EWWW and Smush reduce file size by around six to seven percent. Meanwhile, Imagify compresses photos by an average of 33 percent, and WP Compress reduces the size of images by about a half.
Images can have a negative impact on your website’s speed and overall performance. By using an image compression plugin, you can mitigate this effect and improve your page loading times.
In this post, we looked at the four best image compression plugins:
Do you have any questions about image compression plugins for WordPress? Let us know in the comments below!
Image Source: Unsplash
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