loading speed is one of the priorities being addressed today, especially in connection with SEO. Images are an integral part of most presentations, but also a common reason why they take seconds to load.
Let’s take a look at how image optimization can be addressed in WordPress. The latter automatically shrinks unnecessarily excessive ones in the latest versions, but there is still a lot of space not only for faster loading, but also for saving space.
Compression is the key
If you have your website checked by a service like Google PageSpeed Insight , then one of the recommendations will probably be to reduce the size of the images. By compressing them, you can often save up to 80% of the volume. Can you tell the difference? Mostly not:
By saving the data volume of images, you not only speed up loading, but you can also make it easier to back up or migrate websites.
How compression works
In simple terms, we can say that pixels of the same color are clustered together. This can be done by a number of different algorithms with different levels of output quality. If the optimization is too aggressive, it will save a lot of space, but the photo will be dicey.
It is therefore advisable to choose the optimization level correctly. For example, for a photo portfolio, where it is necessary to preserve sharp images, so-called lossless compression will be suitable, i.e. without loss of quality. For ordinary illustration photos, you can get by with the so-called lossy, which saves more space. They also don’t need to have EXIF metadata, which takes up extra space.
Manually and via plugin
You can compress images manually. There are dozens of online services, such as Squoosh from the Chrome team. Manual compression is not a problem for a few images, but what if there are a lot of them? Then it is advisable to reach for one of the many plugins that usually use the API of one of these services.
When you upload images to WordPress, they are automatically optimized thanks to this plugin. All this without having to do anything else with them. I have good experience with the plugin from ShortPixel , but Smush , EWWW or reSmush.it are also popular . It mainly depends on how you are comfortable with the controls and what kind of plugin limits there are, possibly also the presence of paid packages.
New formats like WebP
We already have compressed images, but we use classic formats such as JPG or PNG, which can be found on the vast majority of qatar phone number data websites. A modern format that is slowly gaining ground is WebP . Google introduced it already in 2010. WebP offers up to a third more savings.
Like any new technology, this format a newly discovered trick to increase conversion on amazon still has its “diseases”. The Safari web browser currently has a problem with it (see overview of browser support ). Therefore, when choosing a plugin for image compression, check whether it also creates WebP versions and can display them only for supported bw lists browsers, and for incompatible ones, it displays JPG/PNG format.