Compressing Images (Online Tools, WP plugins)

For most business websites, images make up the largest amount of content. This is also the case with the page size: images can add up to the page size, thus increasing the page loading time.

One of the ways toreduce this negative effect is to properly optimize (compress) images.

Where to optimize images

It's possible to optimize images in multiple ways:

• Before uplading to the website. This is usually done locally (on the user's machine) or using an onlne service
• After or during the upload to the website. Thisis usually done using a WordPress plugin

Types of image optimization, regarding the quality reduce

Images can be compressed in two ways:

• Lossless compression: the image size is slightly reduced, but the image quality remians almost identical
• Lossy compression: image is agressivelly reduces, but this can affect the image quality

Please note that even the "lossy" compression is often acceptable, unless the images comprise the main target of the website (e.g. stock images, photogprahy blog etc).

The most popular image optimization plugins

• Smush
• EWWW Image Optimizer
• TinyPNG Compress JPEG & PNG images
• etc.

Please note that most of these plugins use an external proprietary optimization service. Free plugin versions often impose some limitations (number of compresed images per month, maximum file size of the original image, ...). So, for a larger or bussier website, it's often necessary to make a separate account on the corresponding service, and pick up a subsciption plan.