Smaller the size of an image, faster the web pages are loaded in browsers, as there are fewer KBs to be downloaded to render the page.
You will be surprised to know that the same image can be 200kb in.PNG format and 50kb in .jpg or .jepg format. Sometimes the difference is even higher
This is not the only factor which makes the images large in size. The image resolution is another factor. Smartphones save photos in .jpeg format but they still are 3-4mb in size because of their resolutions, which are as big as 4000×3000. If you resize them to 2000×1500, it’s size in Kilobytes (KBs) will also decrease by half.
Mostly the image width that appears on the page is equal to the content container. Our is around 700 pixels with Sidebar enabled, and 1000 with No sidebar. We mostly resize our images to 800 pixel which reduces the size (in KBs) of images dramatically.
Surely the PNG format is higher in quality, but when you view the image in both formats at 800-pixel resolution, the difference is negligible but there is a huge difference in the size.
I think it’s a fair tradeoff. When your blog grows, the images will also grow and it will cost you huge in hosting bills.
Now that it’s clear why you should consider optimizing the images for your blog posts. Let’s talk about how you can do it.
You can manually compress images before uploading them on the blog and even the previously uploaded images on your blog can be compressed using the trick mentioned below.
Optimize Images with Image Optimizer
Image Optimizer is a website you can use to optimize images online. But it also offers a software you can download and use it on your PC.
If you’ve got a lot of images that has not been optimized, you can download them all back to your PC using Filezilla (a free FTP Client), optimize the images using the Image Optimizer software, and then upload them back to your blog using Filezilla.
The new optimized Images will replace the images on your blog without any downtime. You just have to make sure you don’t change the file names and its path.
If you want more automated and simple solution for this, then you might want to use an Image optimizer plugin for that.
EWWW Image Optimizer
This WordPress plugin will automatically and losslessly optimize the images to the images which are being uploaded or have been uploaded to your blog.
➤ Download EWWW Image Optimizer
Why you should optimize images for web pages.
1. Your pages will load faster. Smaller image sizes mean faster page loads. This will make your visitors happy, and can increase ad revenue.
2. Faster backups. Smaller image sizes also mean faster backups.
3. Less bandwidth usage. Optimizing your images can save you hundreds of KB per image, which means significantly less bandwidth usage.
4. Super-fast. Because it runs on your own server, you don’t have to wait for a third party service to receive, process, and return your images. You can optimize hundreds of images in just a few minutes. PNG files take the longest, but you can adjust the settings for your situation
Above is the screenshot of the media library where you can see the compression. You can select the images from the past to optimize them.
There is also an option of bulk optimizing the images on your blog which is quite helpful if you’ve got plenty of images to optimize. It surely automates the process of blogging. You can check out other plugins that can automate your work for SEO.
WP Smush
WP Smush is another plugin which works great for optimizing images of WordPress blogs. You can easily optimize existing images and also select the option to automatically optimize the images that are uploaded to the blog.
The plugin works well with just one limitation, that is, you can only optimize images that are 1MB or less in size. The developers of WP Smush, wpmudev offers a pro version of WP Smush to lift that limitation as well as offer many other features.
There is also another Plugin called Compress JPEG & PNG Images and that is what it literally does. The Plugin uses the TinyJPG or TinyPNG service to compress the images, which means, you need to grab the API key from Tinypng which offers 100 image compressions per month in the free account. If you don’t need more than that, you can stick to this plugin else, WP Smush should be your choice.
I would suggest you to keep the images optimized before uploading them to your blog, for that, you can use the software we mentioned in the beginning of the post.
