Image Compression Plugins Available for WordPress
Image compression can be an important part of a successful website. Having a website that can load faster is not just about having a faster website but in fact it is much better for search engine optimisation.
When someone arrives on your website you have just a short period of time to grab their attention. If your WordPress website does not even load, how is it going to grab anyone’s attention. This is why image compression is vital for successful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
How can you reduce your sites load times? A simple but effective method is using an image compression plugin. Now you don’t really want your lovely website images reducing in quality in order to reduce your load time, this would just take the ‘attention grabbing’ feature away from your site. This is why finding the right image compression plugin is vital.
Better Font Awesome
Although ‘Better Font Awesome’ is not going to reduce your image size, it could quite possibly replace images on your site. The font awesome library is a keyboard extension which provides many symbols and icons such as:
We have found that many of these icons could actually replace several images on your site which are making it longer to load. Font awesome icons source the icons from a library which is installed as a plugin and therefore takes much less time to load than an image. The load time in fact is more similar to a simple keyboard icon which you could type.
Lazy Load
Lazy load is the first plugin I came across to compress images. It does not work by reducing the quality of your images, it in fact only loads your images on your site when they are looked at. For example, you may have an image at the bottom of your page. By using Lazy Load the image won’t actually be loaded until the user scrolls down and sees the image.
Short Pixel
Another plugin we came across was Short Pixel. Short Pixel works by using lossy and lossless image compression. Lossy compression is where the actually quality of the image is reduced. Lossless compression is where the image file is rewritten in a more efficient way. This means that when your attachment is loaded, the quality is not reduced in any way. Although not as efficient as lossy compression it doesn’t ruin the look of your website.
Short Pixel is a popular plugin – it has had over 60,000 active installations and the compression algorithms are compatible with most image types.
Installing Plugins
Although there are many plugins for image compression available, these three came across as the most popular working uniquely.
If you are struggling on how to install any plugins, visit our guide on how to install plugins for WordPress.