How to optimise images in WordPress
Image optimization can be a big boost to your WordPress website. It can result in better SEO performance, reduce page load times, and improve the user experience.
Why you should optimise images in WordPress
- Speed up your webpage speed. Unoptimized images can lead to a bloated site that takes longer to load.
- Improve your website’s user experience. Slow loading pages make for a poor user experience.
- Better resource utilisation. Optimising images in WordPress results in less storage usage.
- Improved SEO performance. Pages that load faster have a higher chance of ranking better in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Optimise images in WordPress through compression
Compression entails reducing the file size of an image. Done properly, it doesn’t overly reduce the quality of the image.
The easiest way to compress images for WordPress is using a plugin. There’s a host of free plugins that can help with this.
Alternatively, you can use an online image compression tool where you will upload the original image, customise the compression level and download the optimised file. However, this would be too time intensive particularly if your website has lots of images.
Using a CDN to optimise WordPress images
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is a distributed group of servers that work together to deliver content fast.
For instance, if you’re based in the UK and have web visitors in the US, a dedicated CDN server in that part of the world will serve up your webpage content to them, reducing the amount of time between their request and when the content loads.
CloudFlare is one of the leading CDN providers in the world. 5wire is a CloudFlare Certified Partner, and you can access it from your cPanel dashboard.
Optimole Plugin for WordPress
The Optimole WordPress plugin combines CDN with lazy loading to optimise WordPress images. Though it has a free tier, to access the full suite of features, you’ll need the paid version which starts at roughly £20 per month.
The free version limits how many image files can be optimised while the paid options offer unlimited image optimization for an unlimited number of sites.
Conclusion
In addition to image file sizes, did you know that your website server affects its load speed? Choose high quality hosting with fast servers from as little as £3 per month.
