“A picture is worth 1,000 words”. Compared to plain texts, images express ideas in a more interactive and engaging way. Our brains focus on visual processing so images allow you to grab the audience’s attention quickly.
Not all images benefit your site in the same way. Low quality and too big images slow down websites dramatically. It pays to resize each image you upload and increase the page load time.
A lot of people would use Photoshop or other editing software to minimize the size of their photos before uploading them to WordPress. However, doing that way sounds like a lot of work for each and every photo.
Luckily, that is not the only method to improve your image sizes as well as website speed. WordPress image compression plugins provide a better solution to automatically compress photos. It will display a smaller sized version of images on your website. The main concern left is which one would be the best option for your site. In this article, we will compare the top 6 plugins to compress images so that you make the right decision.
1. Smush – Compress, Optimize and Lazy Load Images
There is a wide range of choices supporting image unnecessary data removal before uploading. Smush comes as an unlimited and free plugin compressing all of your photos up to 5MB in size forever.
The plugin not only allows you to automatically optimize uploads but also provides a bulk optimization option for existing photos. You could resize up to 50 images with a single click.
Trusted by over 1 million users, this plugin helps reduce image sizes without damaging their quality and appearance. You’re able to compress photos in any directory.
However, Smush still has several imperfect points, such as a limitation for photo size at under 5MB. Another major disadvantage is the lack of different compression levels.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer
Receiving a 4.6-star rating and +800,000 active installations, EWWW Image Optimizer is such a great choice coming with both free and premium versions.
Similar to Smush, this plugin increases your page speed in search ranking by compressing and optimizing previously or newly uploaded photos. While Smush only rescales images up to 5M, EWWW can handle any image file size.
EWWW can be highly integrated with other WordPress plugins, CDN plugins for instance. CDNs like Cloudflare, KeyCDN, MaxCDN, and Sucuri CloudProxy are supported, but you have to clear the cache after a bulk optimization.
Besides, all compression will perform on your server which means you no longer have to sign up for a new API key account.
The plugin might ignore images optimized and stored in the database before. You must force the optimize option to override the default behavior.
3. Compress JPEG & PNG Images
With the free version of Compress JPEG & PNG Images, you would get 100 optimized photos per month, depending on the used thumbnail sizes.
Similar to other plugins, you can automatically minimize the size of your new images on upload with no size limitation.
It provides advanced background optimization to speed up the website workflow too. On top of that, you’re permitted to preserve copyright metadata, creation date and GPS location in your images. The outstanding WordPress mobile app compatibility feature differentiates the plugin from others.
For photos already uploaded in your WordPress media library before installing the plugin, you need to optimize them individually.
4. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Besides the free trial with 100 photos compressed per month, you can get 5,000 credit images for $4.99 and come along with 24h support directly from the ShortPixel Image Optimizer developer team.
You’re allowed to optimize a wide range of files using ShortPixel, from JPG, PNG, to GIF, and PDF. Offers glossy JPEG compression, the plugin is definitely designed for photographers. You can make your images smaller with EXIF data removed.
With a single API Key, you could access to ShortPixel from multiple websites. This plugin also works well with photo gallery plugins, for example, NextGEN gallery, Foo Gallery, and other sliders.
ShortPixel could not cooperate with the localhost installation. ShortPixel should pay more attention to this point and make an improvement.
5. Imsanity
If you’re tired of contributors who keep adding huge uploads to your site, here comes the Imsanity plugin which enables you to compress and download images for free.
You can convert the PNG file to JPG format for higher optimization. It’s possible for you to change the BMP file to JPG so photos could be scaled easily.
Imsanity’s configurable with quality, max-width, and height which means when uploading a large image (compared to configured size), the plugin will automatically scale it down to reasonable size for display on your browser.
Even though there are complaints about no support from the author, Imsanity gets a 4.9-star rating with +300,000 active installations.
6. Imagify
Imagify brings out the lossy compression with a tiny loss of quality. All of your images including thumbnails would be re-sized when installing Imagify.
This plugin works well with other WordPress plugins, for example, WooCommerce and NextGen gallery.
There are three levels of compression, including normal, aggressive, and ultra. For the first one, there is a lossless which is not noticeable at all. The second one has a lossy compression algorithm. Lastly, Ultra refers to the lossy algorithm method.
You should consider the support factor when choosing Imagify. According to reviews on WordPress repository, it would take developers or contributors more than 2-day for a reply or even no support at all.
Which Is Your Ideal WordPress Image Compression Solution?
WordPress image compression proves a powerful and effective way to speed up your sites. As a result, you can improve the site rankings and user experience.
There are thousands of image compression plugins available on the WordPress repository. Above are the top 6 plugins that receive the most love from users you can consider. Depending on your demand, you should widely decide which is your best solution based on their pros and cons.
Let us know your choice in the comment section below!
