Whether you use WordPress to host your blog, or simply use it as a content management system for your company website, it’s important to keep your site loading quickly. We’ve compiled a list of the best WordPress plugins for image compression so that you can keep your site running smoothly and loading fast.
WordPress sites are notoriously slow-loading, and one of the biggest reasons is because of their images. Images are often huge files that take a long time to load, which means that if you have a lot of them on your page, your site will take forever to load. This is obviously bad for both visitors and search engines, as visitors don’t want to wait around and search engines won’t reward sites that have a low page load speed.
That’s why we’re looking at some great image compression plugins for WordPress today. These will help you reduce the size of the images on your site without reducing the quality beyond what most people would notice.
Best WordPress Plugin For Image Compression
1. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is the best WordPress image compression plugin. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly.
It can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk.
Even though your images are being compressed, it’ll be very hard to tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed in terms of quality.
Plus, the entire process of compressing and optimizing is automated. This includes image scaling to fit the right size page and device, lazy loading, and even conversion into the next-gen WebP image format.
It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside your media library folders. This plugin support JPG, PNG, GIF, and even PDF optimization.
There is also a free version of the plugin available, which lets you perform image optimizations on your own server. This can be great for WordPress website owners concerned about privacy.
However, sites with a lot of images or sites that get a lot of traffic will want to opt for the paid plan, since it includes an image optimizing CDN, which will automatically compress and convert images as they are viewed.
Best of all, EWWW Image Optimizer is very affordable. Plans start at $7 per month and support unlimited images. If you have more than one site, then you’ll need a higher priced plan.
Included in your plan is a caching engine, CSS/JS optimization, and Google Font optimization to help your site load even faster.
2. Optimole
Optimole is another excellent option for a WordPress image compression plugin.
Using this plugin requires a quick account creation and API key setup. After that, it’s straightforward to use and gives you complete control over your image optimization.
Optimole is powered by an image CDN, so your images will load quickly no matter where your visitors are coming from. With a CDN, your images are optimized in real-time and delivered to your website visitors in the perfect size.
You can view all of your optimized images in a single dashboard, making it easy to customize compression settings for individual images.
It lets you adjust things like the compression quality, large image resizing, lazy loading, and more.
There’s even a unique setting that will automatically watermark your images for you. This is great for photographers who are trying to protect their work.
Pricing is based on the number of visitors you have per month. The free plugin allows for up to 5,000 visitors per month. While the paid plans start at $19.08 per month when billed yearly and support up to 25,000 visitors per month.
3. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is another great WordPress image compression plugin.
It’s packed with advanced features and gives you the ability to choose compression formats. It starts compressing images as soon you as activate plugin and stores your original images in a separate folder.
If you’re using the free plugin, then it requires you to get an API key by providing your email address.
The basic free account allows you to compress up to 100 images per month, and you will need to upgrade to their paid plans to increase this limit.
You can even simply convert PNG to JPEG and vice versa with the click of a button.
It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, NextGEN Gallery, and the WPML translation plugins.
If you’re using Cloudflare as your WordPress CDN, then you can integrate the service, so your images will be automatically updated with the new version.
ShortPixel is also very affordable. Plans are based on the number of images and start at $4.99 per month for up to 5,000 images per month.
4. reSmush.it
reSmush.it is another great choice for a WordPress image compression plugin. It allows you to automatically optimize images on upload as well as offer a bulk optimization option for older images.
You have full control over the image quality and compression with an easy to use slider.
It uses the reSmush API to optimize images and allows you to choose the optimization level for your uploads.
The downside is that it doesn’t have different compression levels. It also limits optimization to uploads lower than 5MB in size. You can exclude individual images from compression in case you need to add an image in full size.
5. Compress JPEG & PNG images
Compress JPEG & PNG is created by the team behind TinyPNG, and you will need to create an account to use the plugin. You can only optimize 500 images each month with the free account.
It can automatically compress images upon upload, and you can also bulk optimize older images.
The plugin settings allow you to choose which image sizes you want to optimize. You can also set a maximum size for your original uploads. Images larger than that size will be automatically resized by the plugin.
You can also choose to save image data like time and date, copyright information, and GPS location on JPEG files.
6. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin in the market. It’s very beginner friendly and will help to make your site blazing fast.
There are image optimization features within WP Rocket, like lazy loading, which will only load images when they are viewed.
They also developed a plugin called Imagify. This plugin lets you optimize all of your images with a single click. It will also resize your images on the fly and lets you restore your images to their original size.
You also have full control over your image optimization and compression settings. All of your images will be optimized to your preferences.
7. Jetpack
Jetpack is a powerful WordPress plugin suite that combines essential WordPress features into a single plugin. The primary focus is security, performance, and marketing.
The image optimization features fall under the performance category. To enable image compression, all you have to do is turn on a single setting. There are no additional settings for you to set up.
What it does is automatically optimize your image and serve images to your visitors using a CDN. This reduces your server load and provides faster image loading for your visitors.
To access the image optimization, you can use the free version of the plugin as well.
best free image compression plugin wordpress
1. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Active Installations: 1+ Million | Rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (8000+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+Preview & Download
Resize, optimize, optimise and compress all of your images with the incredibly powerful and 100% free WordPress image smusher, brought to you by the superteam at WPMU DEV!
Smush has been benchmarked and tested number one for speed and quality and is the award-winning, back-to-back proven crowd favorite image optimization plugin for WordPress.
- Lossless Compression – Strip unused data without affecting image quality
- Lazy Loader – Defer offscreen images with the flip of a switch
- Bulk Smush – Optimize up to 50 images with one click
- Image Resizing – Set a max width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed
- Incorrect Size Image Detection – Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site
- Directory Smush – Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library
- Automated Optimization – Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload
- Unlimited & Free – Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps)
- Gutenberg Block Integration – View all Smush stats directly in image blocks
- Multisite Compatible – Both global and individual Multisite settings
- Process All Your Files – Smush will process PNG, JPEG and GIF files for optimum results
- Super Servers – Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API
Automatically compress and resize huge photos up to 32MB. Use the Smush Pro CDN to serve stunning, high-quality images from 45 locations around the globe.
Bulk optimize every image you’ve ever added to your site with one-click. Double your savings and fix your Google PageSpeed with the best image optimizer WordPress has ever known.
2. WP Offload Media Plugin
Active Installations: 70,000 | Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (300+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+Preview & DownloadSiteGround 63% OFF Special
With the WP offload media plugin, you can seamlessly upload your existing media library. You can even offload your media files in the background while doing something else, and let the offload media system do its job. Bulk offloading media is also possible.
Besides, the plugin allows you to have full control over your files from the cloud throughout the media library. You can even control privacy settings without leaving your media library and decide who can save or download your media files.
One of the biggest advantages of the WP Offload Media solution is the possibility of reducing server storage space. Once you offload your files to the Publitio Media Assets Management system, you can remove the files from the server and free up storage space.
Keep in mind that image and video quality for offloaded files is set up by default. You can choose different values. For example, each offloaded video is transcoded to 480p format, while you can choose from the following video quality formats: 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p. Of course, the larger the format, the larger the video size, and it will take more time to transcode it.
3. Autoptimize
Active Installations: 1+ Million | Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (1060+ Reviews) | Performance: 99% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+Preview & DownloadSiteGround 63% OFF Special
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It can aggregate, minify and cache scripts and styles, injects CSS in the page head by default but can also inline critical CSS and defer the aggregated full CSS, moves and defers scripts to the footer and minifies HTML. You can optimize and lazy-load images (with support for WebP and AVIF formats), optimize Google Fonts, async non-aggregated JavaScript, remove WordPress core emoji cruft and more. As such it can improve your site’s performance even when already on HTTP/2! There is extensive API available to enable you to tailor Autoptimize to each and every site’s specific needs.
4. Optimole
Active Installations: 70,000 | Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (200+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+Preview & DownloadGet Bluehost 69% OFF
FAST PROCESSING OF YOUR IMAGES FOR FAST LOADING WEBSITES ON ANY DEVICE
Our technology allows images to be reduced in size without any visual altering.The human eye cannot detect any but the browser will understand the difference. Optimole keeps your images’ details safe. Optimole best free image optimizer available.
5. Imagify
Active Installations: 400,000 | Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (700+ Reviews) | Performance: 98% | Updates & Support: Yes | WordPress: 5.3+Preview & DownloadGet SiteGround 63% OFF
Dramatically reduce image file sizes without losing quality, make your website load faster, boost your SEO and save money on your bandwidth.
Speed up your website with lighter images without losing quality.
Imagify is the most advanced image compression tool, you can now use this power directly in WordPress. After enabling it all your images including thumbnails and retina images from WP Retina x2 will be automatically optimized on the fly when you will add in into WordPress.
Conclusion
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