Optimize Images in WordPress in 4 Easy Ways

Good image optimization can give a WordPress site the benefits of fast load times, enhanced user experience, and better SEO. There are 4 generally used methods, so come along and learn about four easy ways to optimize WordPress images, I'll also list the best plugins for optimizing images and answer some of the most frequently asked questions about WordPress images.

Optimizing images on your WordPress site is critical for four reasons:

1. Improve web page speed: Images that are too large can slow down a web page. Optimizing your images to make them as "light" as possible while still looking good will make your WordPress site load faster.
2. Enhanced user experience: No one likes a slow web page. If your page takes more than three seconds to load, the bounce rate will be high. By optimizing your images, you can make the wait time shorter for your website visitors and enhance their browsing experience.
3. betterSearch Engine Optimization (SEO): Search engines like Google prefer websites that load quickly. If your images are the right size and load quickly, then your site may rank better in search results.
4. space-saving: Optimizing images not only makes web pages load faster, it also helps you save storage space. This means you can use the saved space for more interesting things like adding more content or features.

Having your images slimmed down will not only make your website load faster, it will also improve the visitor experience, gain favor with search engines, and make you use your storage space more efficiently.

4 Easy Ways to Optimize Images for WordPress

1. Provide images via CDN
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global system of servers that speeds up the delivery of website content, including images, videos, and stylesheets. Using a CDN on a WordPress website ensures that visitors receive data from servers close to them.

For example, if your visitors are located in Tanzania, they will receive content from a nearby server, reducing load times.

You can set up the CDN separately, for example by integrating Cloudflare with your WordPress website. Fortunately, some managed WordPress hosting providers (e.g. Hostinger) offer CDN as part of their service. If you're using the Business package or higher, follow these steps to activate Hostinger's CDN:

1. Log in to hPanel.
2. Click on the "Websites" section, then find and click on the "Manage" button next to your domain name.
3. In the side menu, look for and click on the "CDN" option under "Performance".
4. On the CDN page, select Enable to activate the CDN service.

   

5. click (using a mouse or other pointing device)"Refresh the cache."sidearrow symboland then select"Website Optimization"tab. You will see the ActivateWebP image compression,CSS and JavaScript Zoomas well asIntelligent Image Optimization

With a CDN enabled, your website content is cached and stored in multiple data centers around the world. When users visit your website, they will get the content from the closest data center, which significantly reduces load times and improves website speed and user experience.

CDN propagation (or the process of updating and distributing content across all servers within a network) can take up to 24-48 hours.

2.Compress your WordPress images

By compressing images, you will reduce their file size. Compressed image files will load faster on your WordPress page, thus increasing its speed.

The fastest way to compress images in WordPress is to use an image compression plugin. Such plugins typically use more than just compression to optimize images. We'll break down two plugins that optimize images in one of the following sections.

Alternatively, you can use an image editing program or aTinyPNGand other free tools to manually compress large images and then upload them to WordPress.

TinyPNG doesn't just accept PNG images. It works with other image file formats, including WebP and JPEG.All you have to do is upload the image to be compressed and the tool will reduce its size for you. The tool can also compress multiple files at once.

3. Adjust the size of the picture

Resizing WordPress images is a very effective way to optimize them. By resizing the pixel dimensions of your images, you can make sure that the images on your website don't get too big and affect the loading speed.WordPress comes with this feature that makes this process easy to do.

By default, WordPress creates four different sizes for each image that is uploaded:

• thumbnail: 150 x 150 pixels
• medium size: Maximum 300 x 300 pixels
• large size: Maximum 1024 x 1024 pixels
• full size: Original size of the image

If these dimensions don't suit your needs, WordPress allows you to customize these settings. Here are the steps on how to do it:

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Click "Settings" in the left menu, and then select "Media".
3. On the Media Settings page, you will see options for Thumbnail Size, Medium Size and Large Size. Here you can enter the maximum width and height you want for each size.
4. Don't forget to click the "Save Changes" button at the bottom of the page once you've adjusted the size.

In this way, you can resize your images to suit your needs, helping your website to load faster while remaining visually appealing. This is very helpful in improving both user experience and SEO.

4. Clean up the WordPress media library

Cleaning out your WordPress media library is an important step in maintaining the health and speed of your website. Over time, you may accumulate a lot of images that you no longer use, which not only take up space on your server, but can also slow down your site, especially when creating and restoring site backups.

Before you start the cleanup, make sure to make a complete backup of your WordPress site. This way, if anything unexpected happens during the cleanup process, you can easily restore the site to its previous state.

Clean up the media library manually:

1. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Navigate to "Media" → "Media Library".
3. You can choose to delete each unused image individually, or in bulk using the batch selection feature.
   • To delete individually, just click on the image you want to delete and select "Delete Permanently".
   • To batch delete, click the "Batch Selection" button at the top of the page, and then click on each picture you want to delete. After selecting all the pictures you want to delete, click "Delete Selected Items".

Use the plugin to clean up automatically:

If you find it too time-consuming and laborious to clean up manually, consider using a specialized WordPress plugin to do the job automatically. When using a plugin, remember to check the plugin to make sure it's appropriate for your version of WordPress.

We use the Media Cleaner plugin to clean up the WordPress media library:

1. Open the WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Installation and activationMedia clean-upPlug-ins.
3. Navigate tomedia, esp. news media→cleanerThe
4. click (using a mouse or other pointing device)scanning. Unused images will be displayed in the "concern"Under the column "appears to be unused".
5. Select the image you want to delete and clickDelete (number of selected images) entriesThe

Regardless of which method you choose, cleaning out your media library on a regular basis is critical to keeping your website running efficiently. Not only will this improve the speed at which your website loads, but it will also help you better manage your media files, making the process of backing up and restoring your website more efficient.

Other WordPress Plugins for Optimizing Images
The WordPress Optimization plugin optimizes existing images as well as new ones.

• Optimole image optimization
• ImagifyImage Optimizer