Optimize images in WordPress

There are several ways to optimize your images in WordPress. What they are, and how best to deal with them, you will learn in this article. Let's get started!

Images and visuals are essential to almost any website, as an image can help make a point immediately and keep your attention. In the age of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts, many people's attention span is no longer than 60 seconds. That's why it's important to keep your visitors engaged not only with text. But also with visuals. With your own website, however, you have a certain responsibility to bring it into the user's field of vision as quickly as possible. You can achieve this by optimizing your images. Learn all about it in this blog post.

Why image optimization is so important

Image optimization is an important part of speeding up your website, as an image is usually much larger than the code of your website itself. This makes them an important part of any website. So if your images are not optimized, your website loading can be severely delayed. Not only can this be annoying for the user, but it can also cause them to leave the site or not continue as a paying customer. Or they may fail to convert. So this can have a detrimental effect on your overall performance on multiple levels. And it can cost you sales. That's why it's important to add web-ready images to your website. Let's take a look at how you can do this.

Plug-ins that can be used for this purpose.

There are several plug-ins that you can use to convert your images to another file format or optimize them by compressing them. In short, it's all about reducing the size of an image through compression and optimization. Often you don't see a big difference right away, but it may be slightly blurrier than the original image. Commonly used plug-ins are TinyPNG and WP Rocket, which can be purchased for a fee.

There are several other options for this, which often have a limit on the number of images that can be optimized, after which a Pro version must be purchased. So if you want to do this with a plug-in, you should take a close look at its description and options to see if it meets your needs. And if you don't want to think about it further, you should consider investing.

Start from scratch with the right layout

If you want to avoid installing a plug-in or don't want to use an additional service for it, it is very important to think about the layout and format of the image from the very beginning. In general, webp and jpg files are smaller than png files. Also, the number of pixels in an image can be easily managed with the tools that are often already available on your PC. For example, you can edit it with Paint 3D to make it smaller or optimize it for your website. Often your theme will already suggest the dimensions that can be used. For example, the default size for blog cover images is 900 x 500 pixels. So don't use a full image from a cell phone, for example, as these are usually only 4000 pixels wide. That's way too big for a website.

So before you upload your images to WordPress , make sure you resize them to the right size you need. This will also save you a lot of duplicates and unnecessarily used disk space.

Manually optimize images with offline and online tools.

So if you want to save to your plug-in list and take care of it yourself, you can easily do so with a combination of Paint or Paint 3d by scaling the images properly and then running them through TinyPNG's free web tool once. After that, you will notice that the file sizes have shrunk quite a bit. As a result, they take up much less bandwidth to capture. This is a small extra step that can make a big difference for you if you have years of content.

Test your website's loading speed before and after optimization.

To see the results of your website's loading time before and after, you can again use different tools. The most popular tools here are the standard Google Pagespeeds tool, GTmetrix and pingdom tools. Here you can then check before and after whether your optimization measures have had the desired effect. In any case, you will notice a noticeable difference in the loading speed of your website.

Have you already optimized your images? And how do you always do it? Let us know!