7 April 2022
How to Optimize Images for WordPress
Did you know optimizing your images before uploading them to WordPress can impact your website speed?
When starting a blog, many beginners upload images without optimizing them for the web. These large image files slow down your website.
You may solve this by using image optimization best practices in your regular blogging process.
In this post, we’ll show you how to optimize images for WordPress and show the best online tools to optimize images for WordPress.
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is the method of compressing and delivering images in the shortest file size possible while maintaining image quality.
While the process looks to be complex, it is actually pretty simple these days. You may use one of the image optimization plugins to compress images by up to 80% without sacrificing image quality automatically.
Why It’s Important to Optimize Images for WordPress
Optimizing images on your WordPress website is very important. The following are four reasons why:
- Increase web page speed: Unoptimized images make your web pages bulky and take longer to load. By optimizing your large images without sacrificing quality, you can speed up WordPress.
- Enhance the user experience: Waiting longer than normal for a page to load is irritating for website visitors. The bounce rate is very high for websites that take longer than three seconds to load.
- Better SEO: Google and other search engines reward fast-loading websites and punish slow ones. If your images are optimized and your website is speedy, you have a better chance of ranking high on search engine results pages.
- Save disk space: By optimizing your WordPress images, you’ll be able to make better use of your hosting resources. If your image files take up less space, you will have more space to add other kinds of content and features to your website.
10 Easy Ways to Optimize Images for WordPress
Ready to learn easy ways to optimize images for WordPress.
1. Compress Your WordPress Images
You may reduce the file size of images by compressing them. A compressed image file will load faster on your WordPress website, increasing its overall performance.
The simplest approach to compress images in WordPress is to use an image compression plugin. These plugins usually do more than just use compression to optimize images.
Alternatively, you may use image editing software or a free tool like TinyPNG to manually compress your huge images before submitting them to WordPress.
TinyPNG doesn’t only work with PNG files. Other image file types, such as WebP and JPEG, are supported. Simply upload the image you wish to compress, and the tool will automatically reduce its size. The tool may also compress multiple files at the same time.
2. Resize Images
Another easy way to optimize images for WordPress is to resize their pixel dimensions. Thankfully, this functionality is included in the WordPress core.
WordPress, by default, uses four different sizes of the same image:
- Thumbnail (150 x 150 pixels)
- Medium (up to 300 x 300 pixels)
- Large (up to 1024 x 1024 pixels)
- Full Size (the original image size)
Having said that, you may change them to suit your needs.
Here is how to change the default WordPress image sizes via the media library:
- Open the WordPress dashboard and go to Settings -> Media.
- Enter your preferred maximum width and height for each size.
- Click Save Changes.
3. Serve Images Through a CDN
A content delivery network (CDN) may help a WordPress site load faster and solve bandwidth issues by optimizing images, among other things. It works by delivering an image to the visitor’s location from the nearest server.
Using a CDN is a good choice, especially if your site has a lot of traffic and activity each month.
4. Use Lazy Loading
Another way to keep your images from slowing down your site is to use lazy loading. If you have image-heavy articles or pages, showing them all at once may not be a smart idea.
The lazy loading feature will slowly show when a user scrolls down the page. Every time the user scrolls, a new batch of images is shown in the viewable area of the user’s screen, allowing the server to better react to all requests.
5. Smart Cropping
Smart cropping involves removing unneeded space or background from an image and retaining only the area of interest.
Cropping can be done manually or with the help of a plugin like Optimole, which detects hot spots in an image and removes the sections that aren’t needed.
6. Convert GIFs to Video
You may also convert GIFs to video to save storage space and display lighter files. If you enable this function in Optimole, it will begin automatically converting any GIF files you upload.
There are various online tools available that you may use to convert a GIF to MP4 before uploading it to your WordPress site. Why should you convert? Because GIF files are much bigger than video files.
7. Add Alt Tags to Images
If you commonly leave the “Alt Text” option blank when uploading an image to WordPress, you’re missing out on a chance to improve your site’s SEO value and help it rank better in search engines.
An alternative text, also known as alt text or alt tag, is a brief description that a visitor sees when search engines cannot load the image on the website. It gives the visitor context for what they’re looking at.
Alt tags are also used to describe images for search engines that cannot read image pixels. Rather, they read the alt text.
8. Give Each Image a Descriptive File Name
Which filename best describes an image: “IMG01.jpg” or “2022-honda-civic”? It is, without a doubt, the second one. That is what makes your website rank higher on Google.
Search engines crawl image file names. This is why, for image optimization, a descriptive, keyword-rich image file name is essential. Include keywords related to your website or blog post, with the main keyword placed at the beginning of the file name if possible.
9. Optimize Images for Social Sharing
When it comes to image optimization for WordPress, don’t forget about social media. When you (or a visitor) share your blog post on Facebook, your featured image, together with the title and meta description, is shown. The featured image must render properly on social media to entice people to check out your post.
If you don’t, Facebook will show an incorrect image with your post. The image may be chopped if the image size is wrong. To avoid such social media miscues, use the following image sizes for various social networks:
- Facebook: 1200 x 628px
- Twitter: 1024 x 512px
- Google+: 800 x 1200px
You may also use a WordPress SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to optimize your images for social media in WordPress. It allows you to adjust your social media settings so that your content and images appear correctly on various social media platforms.
10. Use Image Sitemap
Ensure that search engines, such as Google, can see your images when they crawl your page. How are you going to do this? Simply include your images in your sitemap.
By doing so, Google receives the image’s metadata, increasing its chances of appearing in image search results. All you will do is provide relevant data such as the image type, subject matter, caption, title, geographic location, and license.
To create your image sitemap, you may use the Google sitemap generator or the Yoast SEO WordPress plugin.
Best Online Tools for Optimize WordPress Images
Here are some of the best ones.
1. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is the best online tool for optimizing WordPress images without using a plugin. It compresses PNG and JPEG images.
TinyPNG uses the Quantization method to decrease image particles. However, it will not reduce the image’s quality. As a result, the image’s size will be dramatically reduced.
The image size can be reduced by up to 70% without losing quality. TinyPNG may also be used to optimize GIFs.
2. Kraken.io
Kraken.io is the fastest image optimization tool on the market, with a unique algorithm that helps you save space and bandwidth. Your site will load faster and provide a better user experience with optimized images. Kraken reduces the size of the images as much as possible without reducing quality.
3. JPEG.io
Another tool you may use to optimize images for WordPress without using a plugin is JPEG.io. JPEG.io supports a wide range of image formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, BMP, EPS, WEBP, TIFF, and PSD.
You may use the drag and drop feature it offers to upload your images. Besides, you may also use Dropbox and Google Drive to save your images. Images that are uploaded will be compressed without losing their size.
4. Compress JPEG
Another image optimization tool on our list is Compress JPEG. You may use this tool to upload and optimize up to 20 images at once. Once the process is finished, you may either download them all at once or one by one.
In addition to compressing images, you can also change the format of images. For example, you may convert PNG to JPG or SVG to PNG.
5. Compressor.io
Compressor.io is a great tool for optimizing WordPress images. With Compressor.io, you can compress images by up to 90%, resulting in a faster loading time for your website.
This tool supports GIF, PNG, JPEG, and SVG.
Final Thoughts
If you aren’t saving images optimized for the web, you should start now. It will make a significant impact on the speed of your site, and your users will appreciate it.
Not to mention, faster websites are better for SEO, and you will most likely see an increase in your search engine ranks.
Aside from image optimization, the two things that can greatly help you speed up your website are using a WordPress caching plugin and using a WordPress CDN.
Alternatively, you may use a managed WordPress hosting service, which usually includes both caching and a CDN as part of the package.
We hope this post helps you learn how to optimize images for WordPress. If you like this post, you might be also want to read:
