To maintain a fast loading, high converting website it is essential that you optimize and compress your images, GIFs, and PDFs. This will allow the visitors to access your website as quickly as possible and ensure your site stays running perfectly! WordPress is an amazing platform for blogging, eCommerce, business fronts, and almost every type of website you can imagine, but it can be tricky to ensure it stays running perfectly! WordPress allows you to easily share your business and thoughts with the world but this can also become an issue! This is because image files are often huge, take up a lot of space on the web page, and people do not resize, optimize, or compress them.
If you’re like most website owners, this problem has caused your website to load slowly, lose conversions, and use more data than necessary. There are several ways you can optimize your images and in this article, we will discuss how to efficiently and effectively optimize and compress images in WordPress using several free to use tools.
Follow the steps below to resize and compress your images like a pro!
Choose Your Image
There are multiple free websites where you can download copyright free images. If you already have images for your site, that is excellent. However, if you don’t have any, you can use images from free websites such as Pexels, Unsplash, Pixabay, Freepik, etc. You can also select the image size you want to download.
Decide Where You Want the Image
& What Size It Will be
Before you upload your images to your site you have to decide where you want to add your image. It’s important because, for example, if you need a product image, the recommended size is 800×800 pixels, which is generally good enough for any product resolution on the site. But, if you are using an image that is 1920×1920 pixels this is not good. If we just use a trick and resize the image to 800×800 pixels then it will reduce the file size and will be smaller and therefore better for your page speed!
We have a guide on Recommended Images Size for WordPress that you can read to get a better idea of what image sizes go where.
Resize Image Using Gimp
To easily resize your images download the free open-source app Gimp. After installing gimp, open the gimp and drag and drop your image into Gimp. Go to Image > Scale Image to resize the image. From the popup, set your expected dimension and click on the scale button. Now export the image from File > Export. You can change File Type if needed by clicking on Select File Type at the bottom of the window. Then click on Export and Ok.
Tip: If the file needs a transparent background – such as a logo, select PNG, if the image does not need transparency – use JPG.
Optimize and Compress Image Using Iloveimg
After resizing the image using Gimp, now the process to compress the image. There are several sites that can do the compression, but here at WPDesigns recommend using Iloveimg as it works really well without losing the quality of the image. So to do the compression go to the Iloveimg site and drag and drop the image then click on the compress image button and it will automatically compress your image file size. Now you can use your image on your website that will not slow it down more than it needs to!
It is worth noting that you can also resize your images on Iloveimg if they are already the perfect aspect, size and require no cropping.
Resize and Compress Images with Fotor
Fotor is another alternative for resizing and compressing images for online use. It’s worth a go because the optimization is considerable, the procedure is simple and quick, and it also supports bulk resizing. Simply go to the site, click the resize and compress image buttons, drag and drop your target photos, and then wait for the system to process automatically to achieve better resize and compress results. Plus, using Fotor background remover can assist you in converting your images to transparent png formats.
Use the WordPress Plugin ShortPixels Image Optimizer
If you have ShortPixels Image Optimizer installed then you can further compress the image, if not the image will be good enough for most websites and purposes!
ShortPixel is an automated image optimization and compression tool. It’s a plugin that you install on your WordPress site, and it optimizes all images uploaded to your media library automatically. Additionally, it includes a bulk optimizer feature that allows you to optimize all of the images on your site all at once.
How to Optimize Images Using Shortpixel Image Optimizer
- Install Shortpixel Image Optimizer plugin.
- To enable the optimization process, you must configure the plugin using the ShortPixel dashboard’s API Key. If you don’t have an account you can create a free one with any email address. Log into your ShortPixel account and navigate to the API Key menu, where you can copy the “API KEY.” Then, in the plugin’s settings (Settings > ShortPixel), paste the API Key you copied previously. Keep in mind to click the Save settings and validate button!
- Then navigate to Settings > ShortPixel if you are not there and review all of the settings to ensure they are configured correctly. If you have any questions, you can go to this link to read more about all the settings.
- After setting according to your needs, click on save and go to Bulk Process to optimize all your images. If you want to optimize your future upload images automatically make sure you check to Optimize media on upload setting from advance setting.
- Now click on start optimizing to start your optimizing process.
Conclusion
A website’s image optimization and compression is an important factor in how the site performs, especially in the eyes of Google. If your images are too large, you may experience a decrease in page speed which can lead to lower engagement rates and a drop in your search rankings. The same thing goes for having images that aren’t optimized properly. So make sure you optimize and compress your images before you upload them to your site.
