Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins

Why is Optimization necessary?

Images are necessary to upscale the ‘look and feel’ of your website. They not only make your site more visually appealing but also attract more traffic by providing information without having to read through long paragraphs. However, Images take up about 21% of your website’s storage space on an average,and account for 50% of loading time leading to slow loading and more downtime, thus driving away traffic. Thus it is advisable to optimize your images without compromising on their quality before uploading them. wordPress Image optimization Plugins can reduce the image size upto 80% without any noticeable change in their quality.

Following are some benefits of Image optimization:

• Improved Website speed
• Higher SEO Rankings
• Reduced Hosting costs as less storage and bandwidth is required
• Higher overall conversion rates for Sales and leads
• Faster website backups

Our Recommendations of Image Optimization plugins for WordPress

Following are some of the best WordPress Plugins for image optimization and their features listed for you:

1. ShortPixel

ShortPixel Adaptive Images (SPAI) is a plugin launched by a Romanian company that resolves all the performance issues by not only reducing the image size but also by serving the images from a CDN.

Key Features:

• Choose compression level among Lossy, Glossy or Lossless algorithms depending on your site’s requirements. The Lossy algorithms give you the smallest possible images prioritizing the speed of your site.

Glossy compression assures top notch image quality with slight compromise in the page speed.

Lossless images are pixel-by-pixel identical to original images with only a slight reduction in size.

• WebP support: The WebP image format reduces the size of the image considerably without affecting the quality much. With ShortPixel, we can select .webp format for all images served from the CDN
• EXIF removal: ShotPixel lets you remove the extra information such as Author, location, camera model etc., thus reducing the weight of the image further.
• Smart Crop: ShortPixel smartly the crops the images
• LQ Image Placeholders: These are very low-quality images which appear on the page during its initial load. Once the page is fully loaded, the original quality images will replace them.

 Pricing: There is a free version that allows optimizing 100 images per month. However, there are paid versions as well starting from $3.99/month upto $1000/month for more number of images and dedicated servers.

2. Imagify

Imagify is a cloud-based image compression tool that optimizes all the images on your website to the selected compression level automatically with just one click. Its free plan and ease-of-use makes it suitable for anyone to try out for their websites.

Key Features:

• Image optimization automatically to the selected compression level- Normal (Lossless), Aggressive and Ultra.
• Resizing of images to specific height, width or %
• Compress images from online apps, API or even directly from CMS
• Restore the images to original version anytime with a single click

                       Pricing: Imagify offers three plans- Starter (Free- 20 MB), Infinite ($9.99/month- Unlimited)  and Growth ($4.99/month-500MB)

3. ImageKit

ImageKit is yet another image management and optimization solution by an Indian company launched in October 2016. It houses image CDN with automatic image optimization, image transformation and other powerful tools like smart crop, watermarking etc.

Key Features:

• Image transformation: ImageKit allows you to transform your images in real time with tools like AI based smart cropping, watermark,face detection, LQ placeholders, Automatic resizing based on the client's device and browser, styling and positioning controls etc.
• Automatic Image optimization: With ImageKit you can automatically convert images in the preferred format (WebP or animated WebP) based on the device compatibility without changing the image URLs. Additionally you can also control the image compression level and change image quality using URL parameters.
• Metadata Management: This feature gives a cutting-edge to ImageKit that lets you control the Metadata stripping behaviour and selectively preserve the colour profile and image orientation based on the EXIF data.
• External storage integrations: ImageKit also lets you connect with any external storage such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces, FireBase etc. and to attach to any public server or Load balancer such as Magento, WordPressShopify etc.
• Media library: ImageKit includes a rich central repository from where you can organize and manage your content into folders and carry out bulk operations like move, copy, delete etc. This also helps to tag objects for better search results.
• Powerful analytics: ImageKits analytics provides you with ready-made reports on usage patterns, error rates and performance metrics that lets you identify the images that need most optimization and also lets you resolve delivery issues promptly.

Pricing: ImageKit offers three plans, namely Free (upto 20GB bandwidth/month); Premium ($49/month    with 40GB bandwidth per month and thereafter $9/20 GB) and Enterprise (Private customized pricing for those requiring more than 1TB bandwidth consumption)

4. ImageRecycle

ImageRecycle is an online image and PDF optimizer plugin suitable for Web designers, ECommerce and other high traffic, communication websites.

Key Features:

• Automatically compresses new as well as existing images and PDF
• 1-month of original media backup and one-click restore
• Optimization quality can be controlled based on media type
• Max and Min size to be optimized to ensure quality
• Filter media by status, file name, date etc.
• Multiple accounts allowed
• API for custom integration
• Integration with WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Shopify etc.

Pricing

ImageRecycle has a 15-day free trial followed by three options of one-time payment memberships- $10 (1 GB of content with about 10k images and PDF files), $20 (3GB of content with about 30k images and PDF files), $50 (10GB of content with about 100k images and PDF files)

In a nutshell…

Now you don't have to compromise the beauty of your website for performance with the image optimization plugins. All the above recommended solutions optimize your images to the desired size and format so that the loading speed is not affected anymore.