Your website is a window of opportunity when it comes to growing your business. For all website owners with a mindset towards ongoing prosperity, it’s a healthy practice to continuously check your website performance. While you might consider design or content as your top priority, we believe website speed is not to be ignored.
Websites are chosen for their speed as well as how they look.
There are three main factors to have an impact on your site loading speed including hosting, code quality, and media file optimization. In this article, we’ll cover the topic of optimizing your WordPress media files which is totally easy to do and brings no additional cost to your maintenance budget.
So now you’ll be looking into compressing your images using lossless compression technology. There are already many good WordPress plugins out there to help you have smaller file sizes without reducing the image quality. We’ve tried pretty much all the image compression plugins available in the WordPress repository. And now we’d love to share the best 7 plugins that we strongly recommend.
Imagify – Convert WebP, Images Compression and Optimization
Imagify is an excellent plugin to allow image size to be compressed by 50 – 70% with no impact on the quality. After activating the plugin, all your uploaded images will be automatically processed. As far as we do tests on .png images, Imagify tops over all other plugins in cutting off image weight.
Imagify helps remove redundant data which means we could have the same visual result with less information. You can also use Imagify to convert images to WebP format for free. Its settings menu also gives you an option for getting WebP versions for each image you optimize with the Imagify plugin.
Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images
Smush is a big player which lets you optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size, free and without limit, while Imagify sets a monthly cap of 25MB of images. Among the best WordPress image compression plugins, Smush offers the most versatile premium plan for websites with a huge amount of media.
Smush has some more advanced image optimization options including lazy load, bulk smush, and incorrect size image detection. In addition to smushing your media uploads, you may want to compress the images stored in other folders. Smush now lets you compress any image in any directory so that you can optimize all the images on your site.
EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW provides another comparable lossless compression solution to Smush. They both keep the perfect image resolution although the weight reduction rate ranges only between 10 – 20%.
The UI of EWWW is quite confusing with many tabs if you want to get all media file compression under full control. However, their default settings are fine enough for typical demand. The greatest benefit here is EWWW Image Optimizer doesn’t limit your upload file size or file amount per day / month / year.
Besides, their Easy IO service are also available for you to tackle all image optimization needs with a single click! Considering that they offer feature-packed services as well as excellent support, your subscription will surely pay off.
WebP Converter for Media
WebP Converter is just released in mid-2019. That is to say, quite a newcomer in the market. However, it got real big potent with their WebP format conversion technique. Its download and active installation count are also constantly on the rapid rise since release.
This plugin provides a very clean user interface that is absolutely easy to navigate and adjust supported file extensions, conversion methods, image quality percentage, etc. As Google says, WebP is the future, so WebP Converter is also updated, modern, and worth trying.
Image Optimizer and Compression plugin
Image Optimizer is a simple and straightforward plugin to compress, convert, and reduce the size of large images throughout your website. With just a few steps, you are able to configure and perform optimization for all images. This lets you quickly decrease the amount of used storage space on the hosting of your website and speed up its performance.
This plugin also gives you the ability to optimize images from directories other than the WordPress media library. This feature lets you optimize the images by simply providing the URL of the folder containing your pictures.
WP-Optimize – Clean, Compress, Cache
As their name suggests, WP-Optimize is a versatile plugin to help you in many aspects of your website maintenance and optimization. Yet this doesn’t prevent WP-Optimize from being more efficient in compressing media files. After many tests in PNG, GIF, BMP & JPG images, this is our favourite plugin with the most cutting-edge lossy compression techniques.
Apart from image optimization, if you do care more about site cache or database defragmentation, just head to WP-Optimize premium version now and explore its full capacity.
Compress JPEG & PNG images
Finally, the plugin that we really love. TinyPNG with their online compression service has never let me down for years. Manually uploading images to tinypng.com has so far been the greatest way to gain the most reduced image weight. But if you don’t want to head back and forth between their website and your download folders in your PC, then their WordPress plugin will automatically do its job for you.
Featuring the simplest UI/UX, TinyPNG does a very focused job of saving your site weight since it also has options for optimizing previously uploaded images.
Conclusions
So, which one would be the most suitable image optimizer for you?
Imagify – Best choice for compression, keeping the same image quality yet the smallest image capacity
Smush – For unlimited images to be compressed losslessly, yet the free version does not include WebP options
EWWW – If you simply want a free WordPress image optimizer offering unlimited file sizes
WebP Converter – For those sites which have loads of images and take file weight seriously
Image Optimizer and Compression – If you’d compromise your image quality a little bit to increase loading speed
WP-Optimize – For an all-in-one optimization tools & WordPress Image Compression Plugins
TinyPNG – Second-to-best for compression, if you want the most tiny file sizes
What’s more, all of those above are perfectly compatible with FileBird – the Best WordPress media library folders plugin, so go ahead and get them now!
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