It’s no question that the speed of your website is one of the most important factors. It attributes to the overall success of your website. The faster it loads, the lower your bounce rate will be. Also, speed is an SEO ranking factor. Also, your visitors will just plain be much happier if your site loads quickly. One way to reduce load times is to compress images. With that said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress image compression plugins available. Looking for a list of the best WordPress plugins for any website? See this post.
Compress JPEG & PNG images
Basically, it uploads your images to TinyPNG or TinyJPG and figures out the best compression option for your website. Here is a list of all of the features of this plugin:
- Automatically optimize new images on upload.
- Optimize individual images already in your media library.
- Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library.
- Resize large original images by setting a maximum width and/or height.
- Preserve copyright metadata, creation date and GPS location in the original images.
- Supports compression of animated PNG.
- Select which thumbnail sizes of an image may be optimized.
- Multisite support with a single API key.
- WooCommerce compatible.
- WP Retina 2x compatible.
- WP Offload S3 compatible.
- See your usage from the media settings and during bulk optimization.
- Color profiles are automatically translated to the standard RGB color space.
- Convert CMYK to RGB to save more space and maximize compatibility.
- Optimize and resize uploads with the WordPress mobile app.
- Dashboard widget with your total savings.
- No file size limits.
Imagify
I use Imagify for all of my sites. It’s free for up to a certain amount of data, but after you exceeed that, you’ll need a paid plan. However, it makes image compression a snap, and I have seen some of the best image compression from this service. I have seen size savings up to 80 and 90%. That’s just incredible. You determine the settings, and it’s great for when you already have a site built, and you need a plugin that will run through a massive website on autopilot.
It has 3 modes: Normal, Aggressive and Ultra. Normal is completely lossless in quality. Aggressive compresses your images further, with only slight quality loss, which is usually not noticeable. Ultra sacrifices some quality for maximum compression.
WP Smush
Built by WPMU Dev, this plugin does a good job of compressing images. It works like Imagify, but is part of the WPMU Dev suite of plugins. The main features of WP Smush are:
- Optimize your images using advanced lossless compression techniques.
- Set maximum width and height and large images will automatically scale before being added to your media library
- Process JPEG, GIF and PNG image files.
- Optimize any image in any directory.
- Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload.
- Manually smush your attachments individually in the media library, or in bulk 50 attachments at a time.
- Smush all standard web-sized images 1MB or smaller.
- Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API.
- Global and individual settings for Multisite
- View advanced compression stats per-attachment and library totals.
And if you upgrade to the PRO version, you can gain more compression and you can even smush images up to a whopping 32MB in size!
One Standout Feature of WP Smush
You can compress any image in any directory. 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 – including NextGEN images and the images in EVERY WordPress plugin and theme package!
Kraken.io
Another image compression service, raken starts you out with up to 100MB of image compressionf or free on your WordPress website. Some of Kraken’s features are:
- 100MB of free testing quota
- API Access, with dozens of ready-to-use libraries and modules
- Web Interface PRO with Image Resizing and sync-to-Dropbox
- URL Paster
- Page Cruncher
- Optimization Stats and History
They have a pro version, which unlocks a lot more data, cloud storage, Dropbox integration, and more.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel is a freemium image optimizing plugin that is packed with features. The free account starts with 100 image credits and you can buy 5000 image credits for $5. Also, they have an awesome special deal going right now – Check it out!. One thing that really stands out about this plugin is that it boasts that it reduces PDFs, too. ShortPixel is loaded with features, including:
- compress JPG, PNG, GIF (still or animated) images and also PDF documents.
- no file size limit.
- option to freely convert any JPEG, PNG or GIF (even animated ones!) to WebP for more Google love. How to enable WebP?
- compatible with WP Retina 2x – all retina images are automatically compressed. How to benefit from Retina displays?
- optimize thumbnails as well as featured images.
- ability to optimize any image on your site including images in NextGEN Gallery and any other image gallery or slider.
- featured images can be rescaled before being optimized with 2 different options. No need for additional plugins like Imsanity.
- CMYK to RGB conversion.
- 24h stellar support (24/7) directly from developers..
- easily test lossy/lossless versions of the images with a single click in your Media Library.
- great for photographers: keep or remove EXIF data from your images, compress images with lossless option.
- works well with both HTTPS and HTTP websites.
- you can run ShortPixel plugin on multiple websites or on a multisite with a single API Key.
- it is safe to test and use the plugin: all the original images can be restored with a click.
- ‘Bulk’ optimize all the existing images in Media Library or in any gallery with one click.
- works great for eCommerce websites using WooCommerce or other plugins.
- works great with NextGEN gallery, Foo Gallery and any other galleries and sliders.
- compatible with WP Engine hosted websites and all the major hosting providers.
- compatible with WPML and WPML Media plugins.
- skip already optimized images.
- compatible with watermarking plugins.
- option to deactivate auto-optimizing images on upload.
- images that are optimized less that 5% are bonus.
- 40 days optimization report with all image details and overall statistics.
So which WordPress Image Compression Plugin is the best?
Each plugin has its pros and cons. I looked around for a long time before deciding using Imagify. It makes the whole process quick and easy. All I do is upload the plugin to one of my websites, click a couple of buttons to adjust the settings, and then I let it run wide open. After a while, if I do this on an existing site, all of my images, past and present, are optimized to my liking, with nearly 0% visible loss in quality. It really depends on what you are using it for. If you have a lot of PDFs or animated GIFs, ShortPixel may be the choice for you. If you want even the images in themes and plugins to be optimized, you’d pick WP Smush.
What plugin are you using for image optimization? I’d love to hear what you do to slice image sizes down to size.
