It's an undeniable fact: images slow down your site. But they remain essential and you therefore cannot ignore them in the name of performance. The cost of a WordPress website doesn't always take its optimization into account.
Like many sites, you can use a WordPress plugin compression to optimize your images so that they take up much less space.
Optimization plugins forimages Image optimization plugins for WordPress have been proliferating lately, so you have several options. In this article, we'll explore which image compression plugins are the most popular, to maybe help you find the best one among them.
Imagify: the best plugin to compress WordPress images
Imagify is certainly the best plugin to compress images on WordPress.
Available in French, Imagify lets you convert JPEG images to WebP and AVIF formats. This format change allows you to compress the images on your WordPress site without degrading their quality.
In the free tier, sufficient for the smallest sites, Imagify lets you compress 20 MB per month, or about 200 images (with a maximum size of 2 MB per imported image). Alternatively, you can use a paid plan at $4.99 per month for 500 MB/month or $9.99 per month for unlimited use of the tool.
WP Smush: an excellent plugin to optimize WordPress images
WP Smush is by far the most popular image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress, with over one million active installations at the moment. It is an easy-to-use plugin developed by the WPMU DEV team to quickly optimize the images on your WordPress site. It is, of course, compatible with WordPress in its multisite version.
Price: This plugin offers a free version and a paid version. The free version can be downloaded from the WordPress repository. The paid version is actually included in a bundle of tools (including WP Smush). The paid tier costs $49 per month.
In the free version of WP Smush, you can only optimize your site's images using lossless compression (if you want lossy compression, you'll need to upgrade to premium). You also have the "lazy load" option and the ability to optimize up to 50 images at once. You can also resize images (set maximum width and height parameters) and quickly identify images that are slowing down your site.
Related reading : 50+ techniques and tools to optimize your images for the web
ShortPixel: a WordPress image optimization plugin
ShortPixel will help you optimize your site's images by resizing and compressing them without any loss of image quality. It's an easy-to-use image optimization tool for WordPress that lets you choose between lossy and lossless image compression.
This plugin works very quickly and automatically, which is particularly welcome on image-heavy sites. Among its useful features, ShortPixel stores your original images in a separate folder and lets you compare the original file with its compressed version to see the difference in quality and size.
Price: This plugin offers a free plan for 100 compressions per month, then scales its pricing from $5 to $30. The pricing is very attractive and ShortPixel is starting to unseat WP Smush in the hearts of many site owners!
Compress JPEG and PNG images
This image compression service, provided by TinyPNG, consists of an online image compression tool and a plugin that you can find in the WordPress repository.
TinyJPG is first and foremost an online (free) tool that lets you compress JPEG and PNG files. The plugin helps you integrate this service into your WordPress site.
Like most image compression plugins, this tool will automatically resize your images when you upload them to WordPress, and it will do the same for existing images — one by one or in bulk, depending on how you choose to proceed.
Price: Once you install the plugin, you get a free API key which, like ShortPixel, will entitle you to 100 free images per month. If you want to compress more than 100 images per month, you'll have to pay a small fee, starting at $0.009 per image.
EWWW: a good plugin to compress your WordPress images
EWWW has a somewhat dated interface and could use a little facelift.
EWWW offers optimization for JPG, PNG, GIF and PDF files. There are lossless and lossy compression options. The main advantage of EWWW is that there is no file size limit or on the number of uploaded images.
Furthermore, the free version of EWWW performs optimizations on your own web server, whereas all other tools use external servers. This is good for privacy-focused sites. But it can put a heavy load on your server if you optimize a large number of images at once.
Price: Free
How to choose?
That's all well and good, but then, how do you know which plugin is right for you? Let's summarize.
- Imagify Certainly the best free tool for compressing images and excellent in its paid version.
- Smush For free, unlimited lossless compression (with a maximum of 1 MB per image).
- ShortPixel For one of the best optimizations and its elegant interface.
- TinyPNG For excellent optimization and the simplest interface of all.
- EWWW For total free use and no limit on file sizeBut don't forget that it runs on your own server.
With one of these 4 plugins, you will be able to improve the speed of your WordPress site without difficulty.
Follow our Tutorial to easily install a plugin on WordPress if you don't know how to go about it.
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