A very important element and a constant struggle in optimizing the load speed of your website is ascertaining that the images which are uploaded are small in size but still maintain their good quality.
Web pages that are stuffed with lots of visuals, graphics, videos, audio and animated pictures tend to take a lot of time to load and end up making the visitors flee. This increases the bounce rate and keeps you from getting the desired conversion rates or ROI.
Regardless of how they are managed by WordPress, websites that are loaded with graphics struggle to load quickly.
We’ve all quite a website simply because they take too long to load. Research also endorses that visitors spend more time on websites which have a low load time. To perk up the webpage load time, you have to have tools available to measure the performance of a webpage.
Adding Media to Your Website is Important
While adding media to your website may cause some issues such as an increased load time, it does not imply that you can remove the graphics and get away with it. Without graphics, your webpage will not be catchy and beautiful enough to attract the audiences. It will be too dull with all that textual content and will prevent the visitors from staying or even visiting the page at all.
The key is to cut down the size of your graphics or images. If the size is reduced by 25 – 30%, the page load time will significantly improve. Several platforms such as Adobe Photoshop are now equipped with features that can be used to nicely optimize images without compromising the quality.
In this article, you will learn about some amazing and free online/offline platforms and WordPress Plug-ins that you can use to trim down image size by up to 90% without putting in much effort.
Tools/Platforms to Optimize Images
The tools given here are divided into three types: web applications (online), desktop applications (offline), and WordPress plug-ins. Check out!
Kraken is an online application that is used to compress images with formats including JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG without reducing its quality. The software helps reduce the size by a good amount. Users say that the application is able to save an extra 10% on already compressed images and still doesn’t harm the quality. Kraken Firefox and Chrome extensions are also available.
This is another popular online application you can use to optimize your website images. It has both an up-loader and a URL box to upload the image for compression. The application auto-optimizes the image and this is why there is no option to enter an output quality you need.
This application gives you limited control on quality and compression. You have to upload the image from your computer onto it and enter the image quality and size needed after it is processed.
As the name implies, this tool only works for images made on PNG format. Simple upload the PNG image from your computer and you will get the compressed version of the uploaded image.
This tool is exclusively designed to optimize JPEG images. If it is a JPEG image you are using, use jpegmini to compress the size by up to 5 times. The site has an up-loader where you upload the image from the original location on your computer and reduce its size.
Desktop Applications
IrfanView (Windows only)
Whether it is a single image that you need to compress or bulk processing, this desktop application can help you with everything. Some users have even tried compressing the images taken from an 18MP Digital Camera to compress them to be uploaded on social media websites. This application gives you full control to resize and decide the image quality you need.
Trimage (Cross Platform – Linux, Windows, Mac)
Trimage is a cross-platform tool which optimizes the size of images built on formats including PNG and JPG files. More details can be seen on its page called GitHub.
ImageOptim (Mac only)
This is another desktop application which is supported by Mac only. It can compress the images significantly which you want to upload on your site without increasing the load time.
GimpShop (Windows, Mac, Linux)
GimpShop is again a famed desktop application that supports different operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is considered as a free alternative of Adobe Photoshop with numerous tools to edit your website images including one for compression.
WordPress Plug-ins
If the websites you are using are run on self-hosted WordPress CMS, there is a range of multiple image optimizer plug-ins that you can use to auto-optimize the images on your computer without losing the image quality.
These plug-ins make it easier to reduce the website load time and make it more SEO-friendly. This is important on the grounds that Google updated its algorithm recently to incorporate the website load time as a critical factor for SEO. There are numerous plug-ins you can choose from, here are a few common, well-tested plug-ins:
EWWW Image Optimizer
WP Smush.it
CW Image Optimizer
WP Boyka
Which image-optimizer do you think will work best for you? Try as many options as you can to find out one that is the most suitable for you and makes your website a hit!
