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Images serve a lot of useful purposes on your website. For one, they break up the monotony of textual matter so that the experience of consuming your content becomes a lot more visually engaging and arresting. For another, they help to explain concepts in way that’s sometimes much easier to understand than reading text.
Images can also help direct tons of organic traffic to your website. Sadly, it’s not as easy as finding a few pictures from search engines, inserting them into your blog, crossing your fingers, and hoping for the best. There is an actual method to the madness. It’s called image optimization.
What is Image Optimization?
High-quality images are invariable large in size. When you insert large images into your site, they tend to lower the speed at which your website loads, also called page load speed. In other words, a user can come to your website and find that it takes forever for the text and pictures to completely appear on their screen. This can hamper the user experience.
Statistics point out that 2 to 3 seconds is the most ideal time period for a site to completely load on the screen ( 2 seconds if it’s an e-commerce site). Anything longer than this, and 40% of consumers will leave the site.
The easiest way to resolve this is by reducing the file size. But when you reduce the file size, you also have to make sure that the image retains quality. And this is what we’re trying to achieve when we do image optimization.
Why is Image Optimization Important for SEO?
Aside from the obvious benefit of increasing the speed of image uploads and improving the user experience on your site, image optimization is beneficial for SEO because of the following key reason:
Google takes speed into account when evaluating content for rankings. According to the Google developer blog, “The Search team announced speed would be a ranking signal for desktop searches in 2010 and as of this month (July 2018), page speed will be a ranking factor for mobile searches too.”
Of special significance to mention here is image optimization for e-commerce sites. E-commerce sites can be very image-heavy and the impact on the page load speeds can be high. Optimizing images can be crucial to ensure that your e-commerce site actually gets views, visits, and purchases.
JPEG vs. PNG – Which One Should I Pick?
JPEG and PNG are the extensions you see at the end of your file image once you save it. For reference, PNGs are great for illustrations but you really ought to use the JPEG format for photographs to get the best results with image optimization. Jpegs also just downsize faster.
6 of The Best WordPress Plugins for Image Optimization
If you own a WordPress website, you can considerably reduce the legwork involved in image optimization but using plugins (extensions that you add to WordPress to extend its functionality). Here are 6 top WordPress Plugins that you can upload onto your WordPress dashboard for image optimization. I’m also going to include two of the most popular ones for e-commerce sites on this list. Let’s get started!
1. Optimole
Optimole is a great all-in-one solution for your WordPress website. Typically on WordPress sites, you download an image and add it to the WordPress library, after which you insert the image from the library into your content. The issue with this is that adding all of these images, no matter how much you reduce the size beforehand, can add lag to your page loading times.
Optimole takes all the images and processes them on the clouds so there’s no drag on your local server and your website loading time stays optimal too. Another great thing about Optimole is the images are automatically optimized for the type of device the user is accessing your image from.
So, Optimole does the handiwork of making sure the images are perfect for the user’s device, the size of the user’s device screen, and their specific browser.
Currently, with the free version of Optimole’s plugin, you can optimize an unlimited number of images as long the number of visits to your website is no more than 5000 per month.
Download the free Optimole WordPress plugin here.
2. Imagify
Imagify is a great image optimization tool from the makers of WP Rocket, a caching plugin. In fact, the two work extremely well together to speed up websites and compress images on the fly.
Imagify offers 3 levels of compression when you upload images your WordPress site – Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra, with Ultra offering the highest level of compression. Once the images are compressed, you will be able to see a display which shows you the percentage of compression achieved.
You can also revert to the original image or update the level of compression if you change your mind.
Imagify will automatically resize images for your website and the specific mobile, desktop device the site visitor is using.
Download the free WordPress Imagify plugin here.
3. Smush
Smush is what I use to lazy-load, optimize, and compress images on my site. Lazy loading is a feature that lets you defer images that are not that essential or important at the time of page loading. The images are completely loaded only when they’re needed.
So when you’re skimming content, you will sometimes see slowly developing images as your scroll past. It’s only when you stop that the image develops into the full and complete final image. This is what happens in lazy-loading.
Having a lazy-load features stops you from wasting resources in the form of data/bandwidth and system resources like processing time and battery life.
Smush has lots of other great features too, a few of which I’m listing here:
- Lossless Compression – This is where the plugin gets rid of data that just simply isn’t being used and compresses the image without affecting its quality. Yes, lossless compression is indeed image optimization nirvana!
- Bulk Smushing – Smush will help you compress upto 50 images at a time.
- Image Resizing – You can set a preferred maximum width and height and Smush will scale to what you’ve set during compression.
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Smush will locate images that are slowing down your site.
- Automated Optimization – Auto-smush images for super-fast compression.
- No caps or limits for images upto 5MB in size, forever.
- Process all file types – Smush will process PNG, JPEG, and GIF files.
Download the free Smush WordPress plugin here.
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
That’s E followed by 3Ws for you and me! EWWW Image Optimizer offers unlimited file/image size compressions. High-tech rendering means you also get pixel-perfect optimization without losing none of the quality. It also has a free image back up which stores your images for upto 30 days.
If you love all things nerdy, you will love the fact that, according to its creators, EWWW IO is the only plugin that lets you optimize images using tools on your own server (jpegtran, optipng, pngout, pngquant, gifsicle, cwebp).
EWWW IO promises 80% compression on the paid plans.
Download the free EWWW Image Optimizer plugin here.
5. Shortpixel image optimizar
ShortPixel is a great ‘freemium’ image optimization plugin for e-commerce websites! But you can use it for regular sites too! Just saying…
ShortPixel image optimizer doesn’t take up too much space on your website to start with – which is always great. New images can be automatically resized/rescaled and optimized and this will run in the background while you’re doing other things. Lossy, lossless compression is available on most files.
Glossy compression is available on the Jpeg format only but it’s still a great option for photographers.
GeeksforGeeks has an easy-to-understand table that lists the differences between lossy and lossless compression which you can find here. In simple terms, with lossy compression, the data quality may get compromised and you may not be able to restore it to its original form. With lossless compression, it’s the other way around.
ShortPixel’s glossy compression feature according to its blog, provides, “compressed images with better quality than lossy image compression, but with smaller file sizes and faster loading times than lossless image compression.“
With ShortPixel, you can automatically convert PNG to JPEG formats if the size is likely to get even smaller. You can also optimize any image on your site including thumbnails and the images on your sliders or image galleries.
Download the free ShortPixel Image Optimizer plugin here.
6. Tiny PNG
TinyPNG has their own website where you can just as easily drop your JPEG and PNG files and get them compressed, although it’s only for 20 images with a maximum file size of 5 MB each. I use it too, sometimes. But let’s talk about the plugin.
An important aspect to remember when you search for this plugin on the WordPress dashboard is that you should look for ‘Compress JPEG & PNG images
There are quite a few things you can do with TinyPNG. You can get images automatically optimized when you upload them. You can optimize both individual and bulk images from your existing media library. TinyPNG is compatible with WooCommerce and there are no file size limits.
For the more advanced users, TinyPNG is WPML compatible, offers multisite support with a single API key, and you can also convert CMYK to RGB color to save space and support compatibility.
Download the free TinyPNG WordPress plugin here.
And that brings us to the end of this post on all things image optimization and the top 6 image optimization plugins for your WordPress website! I hope you found this article useful.
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to optimizing your website images for SEO? Share in the comments below!
An SEO Copywriter and Digital Content Strategist based in India. I specialise in the strategic crafting of business content that increases visibility and generates organic traffic.
Email me at connect@irenelopezwriter.com or message me here
Way cool! Some extremely valid points! I appreciate you writing this write-up and
the rest of the website is also very good.