Importance of Image Compression : A Great Performance Factor

In this article you are going to get info on how much important image compression can be in obtaining a good level of performance for your website. You will also get info on various image resize plugins that you can use as well to compress images.

If you are using images and not compressing these images on your post then this might be the prime reason for your website’s reduced performance.

So as the title suggests image compression is very important for your website performance. If you are not doing image compression then you are bringing extra load to your website itself.

Now let me get you to the point straight :

The compressed images in your website will load faster than uncompressed images. So for better performance always compress the images before uploading to your website.

Now let’s see how images affect your website performance or load time.

How images affect your website’s performance :

As we know images are very important for making your content engaging. Without Images our blogs will look not so decorative and appealing as it looks with images.

But using images without properly optimizing it can cost you performance. The thing is that an image can take more space than the whole texts sometimes. So images can make your website heavier to load due to it’s size.

Some reasons how images can reduce website performance :

If you have not compressed images before uploading then it will add extra heaviness into the website. The heavier the website the slower it becomes to load.
The larger images take more number of inodes on your servers. So again that is how you will lose unnecessary inodes if you use unnecessarily larger images. This can cost you a lot in future if you are given limited inodes by your hosting.
Even if you have unlimited Inode limits you still should use smaller or compressed images because there is going to be a lesser load on the visitors browser to fetch it. right !!

Furthermore according to imagify images can account for 50% of your loading time.

In short Larger sized or uncompressed images will become heavier for browsers to fetch and show it on visitors’ screen. So always do image compression before using the image on your website.

So if you really want to see rise in performance then use lesser images or compressed images.

Importance of Image Compression :

Now seeing the reasons how images can take most of your content space it is always better to compress the images.

No matter smaller or bigger you should do image compression of every image that you are going to use over the internet.

Use compressed images everywhere :

Not only on your website but also on various social media posts you should use compressed images. I am talking about using compressed images on Instagram and Pinterest as well.

Because if you are using compressed images over the internet you are doing a great job. It makes it easier for the browser to fetch the images and present it to the visitors.

So it’s a thumbs up from the whole internet to you if you are using compressed images everywhere. It reduces burdens off the servers and browsers eventually.

So who knows maybe if your images are compressed over Instagram and Pinterest then your account might perform better than others. 🙂

Now let’s see how you can do image compression.

Ways to do image optimization or image compression :

So there are two ways you can do Image Optimization :

1) Image Optimization or compression before uploading to WordPress Website.

2) Image resize or Image compression or Image optimization after uploading to WordPress with a Plugin.

Now there is a question : which method is better !!

Answer :

The first method is better in general. Because you don’t have to invest in any Plugin and you are giving lesser workload to WordPress.

How to do Image Compression before Uploading to WordPress ?

Answer :

1) There are Online sources for it and according to the Theme Kadence imageresizer.com can be a good option for online image compression.

2) There are free software also to do Image Optimization like in Gimp. you can do image compression in GIMP too.

3) Optimizilla is another online image compression platform that can be useful at times.

I found imageresizer.com very handy and GIMP is also good.

So overall doing Image Optimization or reducing image size before uploading to WordPress is highly advised.

Now about the second method to do image compression :

Image compression with plugins

Well, if you are a person who is having a full fledged system running and you don’t have any time to think on Optimization. And if you just want to focus on publishing only rather than handling images then this second method is for the very busy people like you.

Generally you will need image compression plugins if you are handling too many images with your website. Many people prefer using plugins to compress images and that is also great.

People use plugins to compress images as using plugins can bring good amount of convenience to the users.

Through this second method you don’t have to do Image resize manually. There are Plugins which will do it for you after you Upload the images to WordPress.

Here are the Plugins to do Image compression in WordPress after uploading the image :

1) Imagify :

With over 500k active installs Imagify is one of the most trusted plugins to compress your images.

You can optimize about 20 MB of images for free every month which is sufficient for beginners.

There are three optimization levels available with Imagify WordPress Plugin :

These optimization levels are called as Normal, Aggressive and Ultra levels of optimization.

With normal levels you will not lose image quality at all. The other 2 levels are powerful that can reduce some image quality.

You might lose some image quality with aggressive and ultra levels but it won’t be noticeable at all.

2) Short Pixel :

With over 300K active installs Short Pixel is one of the most reliable image compression plugin.

Short Pixel works on almost all kind of image types like JPEG, PNG , WebP, AVIF and GIF etc.

With Short Pixel (affiliate link) you can just install the plugin and do the optimization in just one click.

So it is very easy to use.

Apart from Short Pixel there is another plugin called Short Pixel Adaptive images that you should see. With using Short Pixel Adaptive images you can optimize all your website’s images in one go via a global CDN.

3) Smush :

Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images is a very powerful image compression plugin.

With over 1 million plus active installs this is the most trusted compression plugin.

As the name suggests the plugin enables you to bring lazy loads effects along with optimization.

Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images is developed by WPMU DEV team. Having over 1 million active installs it is one of the highly reliable compression plugin.

The plus point with this plugin is that there is no monthly limit over how many images you compress. So use it freely without any limitations.

4) reSmush.it :

Having over 200k active installs reSmush.it is one of the most trusted and widely used plugins for image compression.

The plugin is absolutely free for compressing images in JPEG, PNG and GIF formats.

You can freely compress the images that are below 5 MB size.

So reSmush.it is the one that definitely should be on your list.

5) EWWW Image Optimizer :

With over 800k active installs EWWW is one of the most popular and reliable image compression plugin.

With EWWW (affiliate link) you can do bulk image compression and automatic compression as well.

It is like with EWWW everything is done for you automatically. You get images compressed, lazy loaded and converted to WebP format automatically.

Plugin is compatible with most of the themes. You can get the EWWW image optimizer for WordPress here.

Conclusion :

So concluding this article image compression is a must thing to do if you want optimum website performance.

In general also doing image compression and using compressed images over the internet makes internet a sound place.

It doesn’t matter which method you use to do image compression but doing image compression before using it is good to do.

Generally image resize is easily done over the internet with online compression sources. Image resize with various plugins is also preferred. Image resize with GIMP is also possible.

So this much is good for now. I tried to keep it short. I hope it will be helpful at least to understand the importance of image compression in bringing greater performance.

Importance of Image Compression : A Great Performance Factor

How images affect your website’s performance :