Whether you are an active blogger who occasionally uses images in your posts, or a photoblogger documenting your blog experiences with heavy images, image file optimization is essential for bloggers.
Problem
Many images contain unnecessary extra bytes. Simple example: A smaller image means your site loads faster, and has the effect of improving your site’s user experience and getting them to come back. Since site performance is now a factor in Google’s ranking, anything you can do to optimize the images on your site has an impact on SEO .
Solution
I am always looking for the best solution for WordPress users to implement with less hassle to use. That’s why I want to recommend Smush.it Plugin for the easiest way image optimization.
What is Smush.it?
Smush.it is an open source image optimization project offered through Yahoo YSlow analyzation for high performance websites and is developed according to their best practices to speed up your website.
Smush.it uses special optimization techniques for image formats to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a ” lossless ” tool, which means optimizing images without changing their appearance or visual quality.
Fortunately, this has been made into a plugin for WordPress users. The WP Smush.it plugin makes image optimization for WordPress as easy as installing and activating it. After you install and activate this plugin, you can check and see the percentage of your images has decreased in your media library.
WP Smush.it Plugin Benefits:
- Strip meta data from JPEG files
- Optimizes JPEG compression
- Convert certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
- Color strips are not used from indexed images
This plugin will run automatically on your wordpress site, but if you already have an image in your wordpress and you just installed it, then you have to manually optimize it with smush.it by going to the Media -> Bulk Smush.it menu. but after that every time you upload an image, it will automatically be optimized.
