Images are the essential part of any article or post that you post on your website. If you own a website which deals with lots of how to article, then the possibility is that you will add more than one image on almost every post to explain the steps or procedure. However, what’s the use of using images in your article when they are increasing the load time of your website. Even though, you can’t stop adding relevant images to your article, what you can do is optimize images and compress images so that your WordPress site loads faster. One of the measures recommended to make your WordPress site faster is optimizing images. High-resolution images which are at times more than few MBs can not only increase the site load time but can also increase the load on your server. To avoid this, in today’s post, I will show you some of the best WordPress plugins to optimize and compress images. Why use Plugins to Optimize Images? You are right, there are several free online tools that can compress your images for free and reduce the size up to 75%, and it will be a time-consuming task as well. As you have to upload images manually first and then download them and then upload them to your WordPress site, you will, at least, spends few extra minutes on every post. So, the best approach to optimize images is to use the popular Image optimizing WordPress Plugins and make your WordPress site load faster. Most of these image compressing WordPress plugins are free to install, but you can also use premium features offered by the developer after buying them. So, check out these best WordPress Plugins to optimize and compress images. WP Smush.it WP Smush.it is the free version of the WP Smush Pro. The free version offers all the features of the pro version except some. The WP Smush.it can compress images up to 1MB in size. So, if you have uploaded an image which is more than 1MB in size, you may need to check out the pro version WP Smush Pro. Alternatively, assuming the fact there wouldn’t be too many images exceeding the size of 1 MB, you can use any online image compressing tool to optimize it. You can also Set a Static Home Page in WordPress. WP Smush.it allows you to optimize images in bulk. But, you can only optimize 50 images at a time. You need to press the Optimize button again to start optimizing the 50 more images. So, I tested it on one my new WordPress site which has around 250 images (it’s a how-to website, hence these many images for few articles) and I had to press the Optimize button five times to get all the images optimized. Again, if you want to remove the limit of 50 images at a time, then you need to go with the premium version. EWWW Image Optimizer EWWW Image Optimizer is one of most popular image optimizing WordPress plugin available for free. The EWWW Image Optimizer automatically and losslessly optimizes images as you upload them to the media library. You can also use the Bulk Image Optimize feature to optimize all the previously uploaded images on your site. The EWWW Image Optimizer also offers a feature which allows you to convert the images to the smallest possible Size producing file format. Lazy Load Lazy Load takes a bit different approach than the traditional image optimization technique. The Lazy Load plugin doesn’t require any configuration as it comes configured out of the box. The Lazy Load jQuery.sonar to load the images only when it is visible above the fold, resulting in quicker and faster load time of your WordPress site. BJ Lazy Load BJ Lazy Load works the same way as of Lazy Load but offers few more extra features that the webmaster may find useful. Using BJ Lazy Load, you can select the images that you want to lazy load and also replace contents with a placeholder. The plugin automatically optimizes images and server scaled down images on responsive template while serving high-resolution images on the high-resolution screen. CW Image Optimizer CW Image Optimizer is yet another WordPress image optimization plugin and is available for free. It automatically optimizes your images without losing much quality. It automatically optimizes images when you upload them to your site and also given an option to optimize already uploaded images. The CW Image Optimizer is also a great plugin if you are too concerned about data protection. The CW Image Optimizer uses the Linux Little tiles image optimization tools, allowing you to optimize images without leaving your server.
