[ad_1] Searching for the best image optimization plugins or tools to speed up your WordPress site’s images? By now, you probably know the importance of website loading times and page speed. The internet has been abuzz with news about how loading times impact your bottom line and Google has been pretty clear about favoring fast loading websites and blogs. While there are many ways to optimize the speed of your website, one of the first places you should look to make improvements are the images you use. To help you with optimizing your images, in this post we’ll take a look at seven best image optimization tools and compare their results with real testing. We’ll start by sharing details for each image optimization tool along with its individual performance. At the end of the post, we’ll put everything together into a few different comparison tables so that you can easily see how the different tools and plugins stack up. 📚 Here’s everything that you’ll find in this post: Seven Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins and Tools: Individual Details and Performance Below, we’ll share details for the seven best WordPress image optimization tools and plugins. Beyond sharing basic features and pricing information, we also tested each plugin on this list by seeing how well it was able to optimize the same two test images using both lossless and lossy compression: Both images are 1280 px wide and we’re sharing data for the full size image (rather than one of the smaller thumbnail sizes that WordPress automatically generates). We also did not convert them to WebP, which is a feature that a lot of image optimization tools offer. Instead, we kept them in their original image formats. Of course, beyond the file size savings themselves, you also might be concerned with the quality of the compressed images. To my eye, all of these tools resulted in more or less the same image quality, so I don’t think it needs to play a role in your decision: For lossless compression, there was no difference in quality (which is the definition of lossless). For lossy compression, there was a small reduction in quality, but it was very difficult to notice and I didn’t see any noticeably different results between the different tools in terms of image quality. 1. EWWW Image Optimizer When you install and activate EWWW Image Optimizer, it will automatically optimize any images that you upload to your website. It can optimize JPGs, PNGs, GIFs, and PDFs and it also allows you to go through your existing media library and optimize already uploaded images. The plugin can also convert images to the best format if you decide to enable this option in the plugin settings. One of the benefits of EWWW Image Optimizer is that it allows you to optimize images using their specialized servers to provide both lossy and lossless compression. In short, this means that image optimization won’t cause additional load on your server. The paid service also offers other enhancements such as a built-in CDN, WebP conversion, automatic scaling, and more. Alternatively, you can do the processing on your own server for free, but you can only access lossless compression if you use your server. Pricing: If you use your local server for processing, you get unlimited usage for free. However, this only supports lossless compression, which is a pretty big limitation. Paid plans start at $7 per month for unlimited image optimizations for a single site, along with a built-in CDN. 👉 Use our exclusive EWWW Image Optimizer coupon to get 15% OFF. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 271 KB 0% JPG Lossy 271 KB 151 KB 44.2% PNG Lossless 416 KB N/A* N/A* PNG Lossy 416 KB 105 KB 74.8% *I couldn’t get EWWW Image Optimizer to run a lossless PNG compression for some reason. Even if I chose lossless, it still used lossy compression. 2. Smush Image Compression and Optimization Developed by WPMU Dev, Smush Image Compression and Optimization plugin is available in both free and premium versions. After you install the plugin, you’ll be taken to the plugin settings page where you can see how many images were already optimized and configure which thumbnail sizes you want the plugin to optimize, whether images should be resized, and more. The free version of the plugin lets you optimize unlimited images, but each individual image cannot exceed 5 MB. The plugin can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or you can use their bulk optimize feature. In addition, you can optimize image files that are uploaded outside your media library such as images stored in your theme files. Pricing: To remove the 5 MB limit for individual images and access other paid features such as CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, and more, the paid plans start at $7.50 per month. How did the plugin do? Image File Type Compression Type Original Size Reduced Size Percentage Reduced JPG Lossless 271 KB 268 KB 1% JPG Lossy 271 KB 224 KB 17.5% PNG Lossless 416 KB 320 KB 23% PNG Lossy 416 KB 74 KB 82.3% 3. ShortPixel ShortPixel is a freemium plugin that can compress JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs. After the plugin installation, you will prompted to sign up for an API key by providing your email address. The plugin will automatically optimize every uploaded image and you can also bulk optimize images already present in your media library. The plugin supports both lossy and lossless compression methods. It will also optimize all the thumbnails created by WordPress, remove EXIF data, set a maximum resolution for your images, and save a backup of every image you upload to a new folder. Other useful features include the following: Conversion to WebP or AVIF formats for smaller file sizings. Retina image serving. PDF optimization in addition to images. The original ShortPixel plugin optimizes the images on your site’s server. However, there’s also
Continue reading