Future-Proof Your Website with AVIF Images

Is the fear of slower page load time preventing you from using high-quality images? Are you struggling to compress your existing images without them losing quality? With Converter for Media, you can overcome these limiting factors and efficiently improve your website’s speed.

Converter for Media is a premium WordPress plugin that helps you reduce the weight of your images without altering their original appearance. The plugin allows you to convert images to WebP and to AVIF simultaneously.

Although you can convert images to WebP via Photoshop or other WordPress plugins, the AVIF format is much better and enables you to compress images by an additional about 30% compared to WebP.

But how easy is it to convert images with the plugin? What browsers recognize the AVIF format? In this hands-on Converter for Media review, you’ll learn the answers to these questions and more.

Converter for Media: Overview and Capabilities

If we talk about image compression plugins, most offerings focus on minifying JPEG and PNG images. And while they can help you achieve a faster loading time for your site, they aren’t future-proof, i.e., most aren’t updated/optimized for Google’s Core Web Vitals.  

Core Web Vitals are metrics Google uses to quantity and score a website’s user experience. They’re made up of specific user interaction and page speed elements, with images affecting one of them (Largest Contentful Paint). Serving images in next-gen formats is one of the keys to improving your Core Web Vitals score, and this is where Converter for Media helps.

Converter for Media converts your images to AVIF — the latest next-gen image format to date. The AVIF format is backed by big companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, and Apple. Displaying images in this format makes for a high-quality user experience — AVIF images have even better quality than WebP images and don’t carry unnecessary weight.

Some notable features of Converter for Media include:

• One-click optimization. Convert all your images with one click. It’s that easy!
• No server load. Convert using the company’s remote server. Keep your server free.
• High level of conversion. Use specially configured tools to achieve better conversion quality.
• Ready out of the box. No need to touch any script — just install and start using.
• Image testing. Check how much you can reduce the weight of your images upfront.

It’s worth mentioning that AVIF is currently supported by over 70% of browsers, including Chrome, Opera and Firefox. In other browsers, the images will be used in the WebP or original format. The plugin converts images to AVIF and WebP simultaneously.

Pictures are loaded depending on the browser type of the website user. But the URLs of the images will remain the same — Converter for Media does an invisible direct to a file in the next-gen format. This means the best support for any browser.

Hands-On With Converter for Media

Now for the fun part — I’ll show you how to install Converter Media on a WordPress site and use it to convert images to AVIF and WebP for better optimization and SEO.

Installing the plugin

First, buy and download the plugin from matt plugins’ website. Then, upload its .zip file in the Plugins section of your WordPress admin.

Once installed, you’ll be able to configure its functions by going to Settings > Converter for Media inside WordPress.

Plugin Settings

General Settings are where you can choose a conversion strategy. Options include:

• Lossy – maximize size reduction with quality loss
• Optimal – reduce size without visible quality loss
• Lossless – minimal size reduction without quality loss

I went with the default option, i.e., optimal, because AVIF delivers a high-quality result even in this setting.

You can also choose which directories’ files should be converted to the output format. By default, only your uploads (images in the Media Library) will convert. But you can check the /themes or /plugins directory if you want to convert image files from either. 

Additionally, you can set maximum image dimensions — I went with the plugin’s recommendation of 2048 x 2048 pixels.

And if you want to automatically convert the new images that you upload to the Media Library, just leave the toggle in the last option on.

Advanced settings are also available, but you do not need to change them. The default plugin settings are recommended for most websites. The plugin is ready out of the box, so you don’t need to be a technical person to handle the plugin without any problems.

Bulk Optimization of Images

One feature that impressed me a lot is bulk optimization. This option appears below the General Settings and lets you convert all uploads to AVIF and WebP with just one click. Additionally, the list of files that will be optimized is displayed in the form of a tree. By clicking on the “+” icon you can see them.

I bulk-optimized the images on my site — the plugin hardly took 2 minutes to convert around 344 image files to WebP/AVIF. If you interrupt the process for some reason, you can continue it later — no need to start all over again.

Converter for Media also shows you:

• How much weight of your images it saved
• The number of files it successfully converted
• The amount of failed or skipped file conversion attempts

Optimization Results

Apparently, you just need to use the bulk optimization option to convert all images to AVIF and WebP. Once done, you can check the optimization results directly in the Media Library.

Note that after installing Converter for Media, any new images you upload will be converted automatically.

Converter for Media PRO Pricing

Converter for Media PRO has three monthly and three yearly plans. You can use one license on multiple websites, so it’s a very attractive offer for people who maintain multiple websites on WordPress.

Monthly plans: 

• 10,000 optimized images per month for $5/month
• 25,000 optimized images per month for $10/month
• 70,000 optimized images per month for $25/month

Yearly plans (includes 2 free months):

• 120,000 optimized images per year for $50/year
• 300,000 optimized images per year for $100/year
• 840,000 optimized images per year for $250/year

There are also business plans available — these are plans for multi-website agencies.

Each plan comes with a 7-day money back guarantee, meaning you can test Converter for Media PRO for a week without any risk. If the premium plugin does not meet your expectations, you will get a 100% refund. 

Note: One image in the limit translates to one conversion process — not one file in the Media Library. If you convert one image into two formats, it means two conversion processes for your limit.

Final Verdict

mage optimization can be quite tricky to get right. But if you get it right, you can speed up your site without hurting the user experience.

Converter for Media was built to help site owners like you achieve fast page load time — and also get bonus points from Google in your Core Web Vital scores.

Through the years, people have relied upon compressing JPG and PNG files to improve website speed. But statistics from several dozen million converted images using the plugins show WebP files are 60% lighter than compressed .jpg and .png files. In contrast, AVIF files are, on average, 33% lighter compared to WebP images.

With Converter for Media PRO, converting image files to AVIF and WebP is a breeze. A website using AVIF images is faster and more SEO-friendly, making it more visible.

Get CONVERTER FOR MEDIA PRO