[ad_1] 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. Article Continues Below 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
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WordPress 5.8 Introduces Support for WebP Images – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] WebP support is coming to WordPress 5.8. This modern image file format was created by Google in September 2010, and is now supported by 95% of the web browsers in use worldwide. It has distinct advantages over more commonly used formats, providing both lossless and lossy compression that is 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs and 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images. WebP is currently used by 1.6% of all the top 10 million websites, according to W3Techs, and usage has increased over the past five years. W3Techs: Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of image file formats for websites Adding WebP support to core won’t make all WordPress sites instantly faster, but it will give every site owner the opportunity to reduce bandwidth by uploading WebP images. In the dev note, Adam Silverstein suggested converting images to WebP using command line conversion tools or web based tools like Squoosh, but there are also many plugins that can perform conversion on upload. WebP Express uses the WebP Convert library to convert the images and then serves them to supporting browsers. It is used on more than 100,000 WordPress sites. Imagify is one of the most popular plugins in use with more than 500,000 active installs. It has a Bulk Optimizer tool that can convert previously uploaded images with one click. The EWWW Image Optimizer plugin, used on more than 800,000 websites, also has support for automatically converting images to the WebP format. By default, WordPress will create the sub-sized images as the same image format as the uploaded file. More adventurous users can experiment with Silverstein’s plugin that offers a setting for specifying the default image format used for the sub-sized images WordPress generates. A new wp_editor_set_quality filter is available for developers to modify the quality setting for uploaded images. “The media component team is also exploring the option of having WordPress perform the image format conversion on uploaded images – using WebP as the default output format for sub-sized images,” Silverstein said. “We are also keeping our eyes on even more modern formats like AVIF and JPEGXL that will both improve compression and further reduce resources required for compression.” WordPress 5.8 is expected to be released on July 20, introducing WebP support for uploads. The new release also adds information to the Media Handling section of the Site Health screen, showing the ImageMagick/Imagick supported file formats for the site in case users need it for debugging. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingCreate Per-Post Social Media Images With the Social Image Generator WordPress Plugin – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] It was a bit of a low-key announcement when Daniel Post introduced Social Image Generator to the world in February via tweet. But, when you get repped by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks and the co-founder of WordPress uses your plugin (come on, Matt, set a default image), it means your product is on the right track. I am not easily impressed by every new plugin to fly across my metaphorical desk. I probably install at least a couple dozen every week. Sometimes, I do so because something looks handy on the surface, and I want to see if I can find some use for it. Other times, I think it might be worth sharing with Tavern readers. More often than not, I consider most of them cringeworthy. I have high standards. As I chatted with Post about this new plugin, I was excited enough to call Social Image Generator one of those OMG-where-have-you-been? types of plugins. You will not hear that from me often. Post quit his day job to venture out earlier this year, creating his one-man WordPress agency named Posty Studio. Social Image Generator is its first product. “I kept seeing tutorials on my Twitter feed on how to automatically generate images for your social media posts, but unfortunately, they all used a similar approach (Node.js) that just wasn’t suitable for WordPress,” said Post of the inspiration for the plugin. “This got me thinking: would it be possible to make this for WordPress? I started playing around with image generation in PHP, and when I got my proof of concept working, I realized that this might actually be something I should pursue.” In our chat over Slack, we actually saw the plugin in action. As he shared Coyier’s article from CSS-Tricks, the chatting platform displayed the social image in real-time. Auto-generated image appearing via Slack. Maybe it was fate. Maybe Post knew it would happen and thought it would be a good idea to show off his work as we talked about his project. Either way, it was enough to impress the writer who is unafraid to call your plugin a dumpster fire if he smells smoke. Post seems to be hitting all the right notes with this commercial plugin. It has a slew of features built into version 1.x, which we will get to shortly. It is dead simple to use. It is something nearly any website owner needs, assuming they want to share their content via social networks. And, with a $39/year starting price, it is not an overly expensive product for those on the fence about buying. How the Plugin Works After installing and activating Social Image Generator, users are taken to the plugin’s settings screen. Other than a license key field and a button for clearing the image cache, most users will want to dive straight into the template editor. At the moment, the plugin includes 23 templates. From Twenty Seventeen to Twenty Twenty-One, each of the last four default WordPress themes also has a dedicated template. After selecting one, users can customize the colors for the logo, post title, and more — the amount of customization depends on the chosen template. Browsing the plugin’s templates. Aside from selecting colors, users can choose between various logo and text options. They can also upload a default image for posts without featured images. Editing a template from Social Image Generator. When it comes time to publish, the plugin adds a meta box to the post sidebar. Users can further customize their social image and text on a per-post basis. Social image preview box on the post-editing screen. Once published, the plugin creates an image that will appear when a post is shared on social media. On the whole, there is a ton that anyone can do with the built-in templates. There is also an API for developers to create their own. For a first outing, it is a robust offering. However, there is so much more that can be done to make the plugin more flexible. Version 2.0 and Beyond Thus far, Post said he has received tons of positive feedback along with feature requests. Primarily, users are asking for more customization options and the ability to create and use multiple templates. These are the focus areas for the next version. With a 1,718% increase in revenue in the past month, it seems he might have the initial financial backing to invest in them. “I’ve started building a completely overhauled drag-n-drop editor, which will allow you to create basically any custom image you want,” he said. “It will be heavily inspired by the block editor, and I want to keep the UI and UX as close to the block editor as possible.” The new template editor would allow users to create multiple layers, an idea similar to how Photoshop, Gimp, and other image-editing software works. The difference would be that it can pull in data from WordPress. “For example, an ‘Image’ layer will have options such as height/width and positioning, as well as some stylistic options like color filters and gradient overlays,” said Post. “A ‘Text’ layer can be any font, color, and size and can show predefined options (post title, date, etc.) or whatever you want. You can add an infinite number of layers and order them however you’d like.” He seems excited about opening up new possibilities with an overhauled editor. Users could potentially create social image templates for each post type. A custom layer might pull in post metadata, such as displaying product pricing or ratings from eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce. “The prebuilt templates will still exist, similar to Block Patterns in the block editor,” said the plugin developer. “They will, however, serve as a starting point rather than the final product. I’ll also try to implement theme styling as much as possible. “The possibilities here are so endless, and I’m incredibly excited for this next part.” Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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