One of the main reasons behind the popularity of WordPress is its repository of plugins. You have got a plugin to do almost anything, including integration of social sharing buttons, creating static html files, managing mailing lists, optimize your blog for speed and performance and many more.
Optimizing your images not only helps your WordPress site load faster, but can also boost your SEO. Every website owner should try to provide the better user experience to their visitors.
Using large image files that take more loading time then how you bring a modernized user experience. If you have heavy images on your site, maybe you do not have optimized the same for search engines. So, you will lose both the user experience and SEO.
In this article, we have collected the best WordPress plugins to optimize your images and increase your site’s speed and performance. This round-up of plugins includes tools for compression and SEO.
1. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is the image optimization plugin that will automatically decreases the size of your images without affecting image quality as you upload them to your blog. It can optimize images that you have previously uploaded.
The plugin uses several free server tools (jpegtran, optipng, pngout, pngquant and gifsicle) to perform these optimizations and can either replace or keep a copy of the original uploaded file. Another nice feature of this plugin is the ability to convert your images to a different file format like JPG to PNG, PNG to JPG or GIF to PNG, which can yield smaller file sizes. It can also optionally apply lossy reductions for JPG and PNG images.
2. WP Smush.it
WP Smush.it lets you optimize images by compressing them individually in the Media Library or in bulk through sub-menu items under “Media.” The plugin works by stripping meta data from JPG files, optimizing JPEG compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs and stripping the un-used colors from indexed images.
Every image you upload to your site will automatically be run through the plug-in so there isn’t anything extra that you need to do. You can also optimize existing images with just a few clicks.
3. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically adds the alt and title attributes to your images. This plugin helps you to boost your SEO, and you can get more organic traffic through search engines. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images adds them in according to the options you set.
ALT and TITLE attribute is important part of search engine optimization. ALT attribute describes your images to search engines. TITLE attribute plays a lesser role though is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when a user hovers over an image.
4. CW Image Optimizer
CW Image Optimizer is based on the WP Smush.it plugin, though unlike the WP Smush.it plugin. This means your images never leave your server. This plugin uses Linux littleutils image optimization tools, which automatically and losslessly optimizes your images as you upload them to your WordPress site. It can also optimize the images that you have already uploaded in the past.
CW Image Optimizer uses lossless optimization techniques, so your image quality will be exactly the same before and after the optimization. It’s the only one thing that will change your file size.
5. Imsanity
Imsanity is a free plugin that automatically resizes images to a more “sane” size. The only options you need to configure are the maximum size of uploaded images and jpeg image quality. When a contributor uploads an image that is larger than the configured size, this plugin will automatically scale it down to the configured size and replace the original image.
This plugin also provides a bulk-resize feature which can be used to resize images that were uploaded prior to installing Imsanity. You can also convert BMP files to JPG so images can be scaled.
6. PB Responsive Images
PB Responsive Images automatically reformats all your images into a format similar to the picture tag proposed by the Responsive Images Community Group on w3.org. The plugin reformats your images according to standard CSS media queries and SLIR query pairs, offering you a great deal of flexibility.
This plugin provides shortcodes so you can customize the queries used per image, and also helper functions that can be used to customize the queries used per post or per layout.
7. Hammy
Hammy is a free WordPress image optimization plugin that takes your regular content images and regenerates a number of smaller sized images. When a user accesses your website, they see the most appropriate sized image (or the smallest one possible). The plugin helps your website load faster, especially on mobile.
Hammy only works for images within posts and pages, not custom post types. The plugin provides alternate image size in a way that only jQuery can access, but if jQuery isn’t available, Hammy will fall back to the original image. Hammy also takes on any classes or alternate titles from the original image and it does not make any changes to your database.
8. ImagePro
ImagePro is a free, simple and effective WordPress image optimization plugin lets you upload, resize, add, and change images instantly. The plugin allows you to manage your media collection with ease and use it for any post or page.
You can easily manage the media collection using this plugin as it offers a way to search, filter by file type facilities. It provides frames and captions for your pictures. Also, you can drag and drop any image to post and resize it there itself.
9. Media File Renamer
Media File Renamer lets rename your media files by updating their titles. The plugin also automatically updates their links in posts. This plugin allows you to rename multiple files and titles inside the WordPress media library and automatically re-link those files inside all posts and pages.
You can also bulk-rename all your files all at once. Search engines like Google give a lot of importance to file names so it’s important to be descriptive and use appropriate keywords to improve the SEO of your images.
10. WP Facebook Open Graph protocol
Facebook Open Graph protocol allows you to share your blog content not only with your readers, but their Facebook friends as well. This plugin adds well executed and accurate Facebook Open Graph Meta tag information to your site so when links are shared it looks awesome.
The best part is whenever someone liked your content, Open Graph will be published on their Facebook profile. Also, Open Graph allows you to explore more interesting ways to interact and engage with your readers. The plugin builds up your brand and increases your site’s traffic.
This plugin will pull all those images and feed them to Facebook and Google + so you can hit the arrows to select which one you want. Open Graph will use the fallback image first if it is selected as default, after will do featured image next and then any content images. The plugin will use the title and meta description from any SEO plugin or theme, including Genesis and Thesis. This plugin also works on Google Plus, and Linkedin.
11. Watermark Reloaded
Watermark Reloaded plugin allows you to watermark your uploaded images with different fonts, colors and applies those watermarks to different image sizes (thumbnail, medium, large, fullsize).
This plugin allows you to position the watermark anywhere on the image within Watermark Reloaded settings. It is simple to use and provide you with instant preview of how your watermark will look like on the uploaded image.
12. Bulk Resize Media
Bulk Resize Media is based on the “Imsanity” plugin. Bulk Resize Media automatically resizes huge image uploads and makes sure the maximum upload size is respected for all uploaded images. This plugin also provides a bulk-resize feature which can be used to resize images that were uploaded prior to installing Bulk Resize Media.
You can optionally convert BMP files to JPG. It allows you to configure of maximum width, height and jpg quality.
13. Lazy Load
Lazy Load makes your site load faster and preserves your server’s bandwidth. It uses jQuery.sonar to only load an image when it’s visible above fold. Lazy Load is the easiest and a great image optimization plugin for WordPress. You will ever have to use, just install and activate, and it needs no configurations.
This plugin is an amalgamation of code written by the WordPress.com VIP team at Automattic, Jake Goldman (10up LLC), and the TechCrunch 2011 Redesign team.
14. BJ Lazy Load
BJ Lazy Load lets you lazy load selected images, including article images and thumbnails, Gravatar images and content iframes, and replace content with a placeholder. Unlike Lazy Load, there are some simple settings that allow you to customize how the plugin works, while choosing a placeholder and skipping images with classes.
BJ Lazy Load provides size optimized images that automatically serves scaled down images in responsive designs, and automatically serves hiDPI images for hiDPI screens like Apples Retina Display.
15. WP Retina 2x
WP Retina 2x makes your website look beautiful and smooth on retina (high-DPI) displays such as the MacBook Pro Retina and the iPad. The retina images will be generated for you automatically (you can also do it manually), served. Also, you can control everything from the Retina Dashboard.
It supports 4 different methods such as PictureFill, Retina.js, IMG Rewrite and Retina-Images to serve the images to your visitors.
16. WP Performance Pack
WP Performance Pack makes speeding up WordPress core the easy way, no core patching required. This plugin features options to improve localization performance and improved image handling.
WP Performance Pack combined with CDN support for images, both in posts and backend. The plugin offers similar image acceleration as Jetpack’s Photon.
17. Resize Image After Upload
Resize Image After Upload is a simple plugin that automatically resizes uploaded image files such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG to within a given maximum width or height to reduce server space usage. It is necessary because images from digital cameras and smartphones can now be over 10MB each due to higher megapixel counts.
Also, Resize Image After Upload has the option to force recompression of JPEGs, regardless of whether they are resized or not. You can also convert uploaded GIF and PNG images into JPEG format.
