Images are very important part of any website because they can attract more users to your site. However, unnecessarily large image file sizes can impact your site negatively by increasing the loading time of your site to a huge extent.
A good quality image can attract tons of traffic to your site, so you should always take the images seriously while writing your blog post.
Images can also send you traffic through the image search option in Google, all you need to do is to optimize your images with proper alt tag and title tag.
Many newbie bloggers use extra large images without understanding the proper file size required by the particular theme they use. It’s really important to understand the WordPress theme you use for your site and the image sizes which is used by that theme so that you can insert correct image dimension.
You can use WordPress thumbnail manager plugins to optimize the featured images of your site to make it perfect to your need.
In this post, we have collected some of the best image optimization plugins that will help you to optimize the images in your blog post to make your site quick.
Top Image Optimization Plugins for WordPress
WP Smush.it
A very popular image optimization plugin for WordPress, WP Smush.it can optimize your JPEG, GIF and PNG images individually or in bulk as per your requirement.
It’s a very easy plugin to get started with, if you install this plugin in an existing site, all you need to do is to activate the plugin go to Settings > Media and optimize all your existing images. And as far the new images are concerned, you don’t have to do anything because they will be optimized automatically as you upload a theme.
The free version of this plugin lets you compress images up to 1MB in size, and the pro version of the plugin can help you to optimize images up to 5MB in size.
Optimus I am using this plugin currently, and it’s quite effective. This plugin can optimize the images up to 70% which will save a lot of bandwidth for you and make your site quick. As you upload the images on your site, the plugin sends those to the Optimus server simultaneously and send you the optimized version. And the best part is that it will never alter the quality of images. The plugin will automatically process the images as they are uploaded, and you have the option to stop the automatic optimization if you wish to.
Monarch Social Sharing
This is one of the leading social sharing plugins for WordPress though this plugin will not optimize your images differently but it will help you to bring in a lot of traffic to your site by making it really easy for your users to share the images. This plugin offers you a huge number of features as far as the social functionalities are concerned, you get a number of different designs as far as the buttons are concerned and a number of different placement options so that you can maximize the conversion. The plugin is easy to use and comes with a very powerful admin dashboard where you can manage everything related to the plugin. The detailed statistics offered by the plugin will always keep aware of the conversion so that you can make necessary changes if you want to.
EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is another very effective WordPress image optimization plugin that will automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. You can also optimize the images which you have already uploaded in a similar way like WP Smush.it. This plugin will never deteriorate the quality of your site but it will speed up your site by optimizing the images to maximum possible extent.
CW Image Optimizer
Like the other two plugins mentioned above, CW Image Optimizer also can optimize the images in a WordPress site automatically and losslessly. It can also optimize the images which were uploaded in the past. CW Image Optimizer plugin is based on the WP Smush.it plugin. But unlike the WP Smush.it plugin, your image files will get stored on your own server and not a third party.
Hammy
Hammy is an intelligent plugin that will create many smaller sized version of the images from your content and when a user visits your site it will present them the most appropriate image. This plugin will help you to offer a great experience for your users specially who visits your site through the small screen devices.
PB Responsive Images
PB Responsive Images plugin will help you to create perfectly sized images which are required by your WordPress theme. The default configuration provides the necessary image sizes for the Twenty Eleven theme for reference which you will have to update as per the requirement of your theme.
SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is another great plugin to optimize your images for a search engine like Google. This WordPress SEO plugin will automatically update all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes which are really important for SEO purposes. The ALT attribute is an important part of any image because that will help users to find images related to the keyword in search results.
ShortPixel is an image compression tool that will help you to improve the loading speed of your site by optimizing your images without affecting the quality of the images. This plugin optimizes images automatically using both lossy and lossless compression. After registration for the tool, you will get the API key which you can use for multiple websites, and the best part if that it stores the original copy of the image which makes it really easy to restore when you require it.
Responsive Images by Pixtulate
Another very useful image optimization plugin that will scale, crops and optimizes responsive images on demand using Pixtulate’s servers. The images are served through worldwide free CDN making fast image delivery for your site to provide a great experience for your users.
Compress JPEG & PNG images
This is the official WordPress plugin TinyPNG which will help you to compress JPEG and PNG images and speed up your site. This plugin automatically optimizes your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.
BJ Lazy Load
Lazy loading is a technology which loads your text content instantly and loads the images as the user scroll down the page. It replaces all your post images, post thumbnails, gravatar images and content iFrames with a placeholder and loads the original image when the user view the particular content piece.
Conclusion
It’s extremely important to optimize the images on your site because images can slow down your site to a huge extent and the image optimization plugins mentioned in this post will help you to optimize your images automatically and speed up your site.
2 comments
Write commentsFilament
ReplyIn a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.
Filament
ReplyIn a single WordPress plugin, Filament contains a group of useful features including Flare, a social share button plugin that makes it easy for others to share your blogpost on Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, and more—even spots like Hacker News and Reddit. Other Filament apps include: MailChimp subscribe form, Google Analytics tracking, all-in-one profiles, code management, and share highlighter.
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