Image plays an imperative role in making your website resonate with your visitors.
Visual imagery generates emotions and responses that are fundamentally unpredictable or uncontrollable and is an effective mode of appealing them over.
Insertions of appropriate and sharp images are vital for a website to connect with the users but high resolution images have certain drawbacks in term of loading speed.
Furthermore, Google and other search engines confer high preference to web pages that are highly optimized for speed while as slow site speeds degrade the user experience.
I’ve short listed some magnificent image optimization plugins for WordPress that can enhance your site pace without compromising image usability factor.
1) WP Smush
WP Smush is a free plugin for WordPress. This plugin ensure that any images upload to your website are as small as possible in terms of file size without any visible loss in image quality. One can bulk optimize all of existing images without causing any strain on the server.
It optimizes JPEG compression, convert certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and strip un-used colors from indexed images. WP Smush Pro is an advance tool to optimize more and larger image files faster to increase your site’s performance.
Apart from that one can get 24/7/365 support from the best WordPress support team on the planet includes Hummingbird page speed booster, Uptime monitoring and security hardening.
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2) Short Pixel
The ShortPixel plugin installs directly into your WordPress Dashboard. After installing and activating the plugin, every JPG, PNG, and GIF will be automatically optimized by reducing image size as much as 90%, and this plugin doesn’t enable you to turn off this option at all, as most others do.
ShortPixel can compress past images and optimize your website history too and automatically saves a backup of every image you upload to a new folder. ShortPixel provides 24hr support directly from the developers plus 40 days optimization report with all image details and overall statistics.
It also works great for eCommerce websites using Woo Commerce plugin. ShortPixel has multiple payment plans including a free plan that offers 100 optimize images a month, and credits for additional tasks can be purchased separately or earned by referring new users to the service.
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3) EWWW
‘The Hammer’ is the leading choice of WordPress users with over (400k) downloads and ratings of 4.5/5.0 optimize images while uploading as well as previous ones without losing the quality. EWWW plugin can run on your own servers by default, instead of connecting to a third party service that has numerous advantages, including privacy, ownership and speed in processing your images.
The plugin uses the gifsicle, jpegtran, pngquant, pngout and optipng image tools to optimize your images without losing quality.
An equally wide variety of price points are available including monthly plan that costs just $1 up front and then prices that range from .005/image down to .002/image.
If you’re publishing a high-volume of images then the Iron Plan starts at $9/month for 3000 images and the Tungsten plan costs $500 for 250,000 images. Prepaid image credits don’t expire which is a nice feature.
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4) Kraken
Kraken is an image optimization and compression platform with additional capabilities such as image resizing. It automatically shrinks the size of images, while retaining the visual quality intact to the extent that results never need to be manually checked for fidelity.
Kraken.io was built with the purpose of being a single, easy-to-use tool that supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, Animated GIF and SVG formats. Kraken API key and secret can be used on many sites/blogs as they have no per-site license.
One can optionally preserve one or more of the Date, Copyright, Geotag, Orientation, Profile EXIF metadata tags too. Kraken free account comes with a 1MB maximum file size and intelligent lossy compression and Micro is the lower price plan available at $5/month for 500MB of images.
Advanced plans jump to $19/month for 5GB of data and if you’re in need of an enterprise plan, it’ll run $79/month for 60GB.
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5) Optimus
Optimus is an image optimization plugin which uses lossless compression techniques to ensure your pages load faster. The Optimus plugin simultaneously sends the images to the Optimus server and the image is processed and sent back in optimized form.
After the image optimization and transfer process, the Optimus server immediately deletes all the temporarily stored files. This plugin can optimize the images up to 70% which will save a lot of bandwidth for you and make your site quick.
Optimus supports the conversion of images to the new WebP image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web.
Optimus offer free model plan which allows up to a maximum file size of 100KB. Optimus HQ plan for $29 a year which gives you everything and a license for all of your own projects. Optimus HQ Pro plan which is $149 a year and will give you access to everything but also allow you to use it for all your own projects as well as customers and clients.
Optimus is also compatible with both WordPress Multisite and Woo Commerce sites.
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6) Imsanity
If contributors are uploading huge photos or if you are tired of manually scaling then Imsanity will automatically scale it down to the configured size and replace the original one.
Imsanity automatically resizes huge image with a max width, height and quality to a size that is more reasonable for display in browser, yet still more than large enough for typical website use.
Imsanity also provides a bulk-resize feature to selectively resize previously uploaded images to free up disk space.
This plugin is perfect for blogs that do not necessitate hi-resolution original images to be stored and/or the contributors don’t want to scale images before uploading.
Imsanity plugins has more than 100k active users and got rating of 4.8 out of 5.0 stars.
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7) Tiny JPEG & PNG
Tiny JPG & PNG Images is relatively more radical than the other plugins when it comes to image optimization. It utilizes only lossy compression methods to reduce the file sizes while mostly preserving the quality of the images undergoing the procedure. This plugin selectively lessening the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data although the effect is virtually imperceptible but it makes a huge difference in file size.
After you upload an image to your WordPress site, each resized image is uploaded to the TinyJPG or TinyPNG service. On average JPEG images are compressed by 40-60% and PNG images by 50-80% without visible loss in quality. This plugin can make your website will load faster also save storage space and bandwidth too.
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