How To Compress Images: Detailed Guide [Q/A Sessions]

Google has officially declared that it will include Page speed among those factors which will effect position of websites in search engine result pages.

This directly means that your website’s good speed can help you get a good position in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) and get good organic traffic by ranking better than your competitors.

Tools like GTMetrix, Google Page Speed Insights, Pingdom etc. can help you checkout speed of your website and they will also tell you important points on which you need to work in order to optimize your website.

One such suggestion which you have often noticed in these tools is related to Image Compression/ Image Optimization. (Refer to the below Image)

Optimize/Compress Images: GTMetrix Suggestions

Proper Image Optimization can help you do great improvements in speed of your website.

In this article, we will discuss Image compression tools and Wordpress plugins, best tactics and techniques to follow during Image compression and best tools and plugins to compress Images.

So Let's start the discussion.

How to Compress Images and Improve Page Speed Score

Image Compression is a process through which you can decrease the size of a particular image without effecting the quality of an image.

For e.g. If you have a image of 100KB and you compress it with an image compression tool or plugin, you will be able to decrease the size of the image but the quality of the image will not be effected.

Image compression is really important because through Image compression only, you can do a great improvement in your website’s page loading speed.

Images can be compressed through two different ways through two methods:-

#Method 1:- Compress Images with the help of a Plugin. (Only for Wordpress Users)

#Method 2:- Compress Images with help of an Online Image Compression Tool.

Method 1:- Compress Images with Help of a Plugin

This approach is possible only for Wordpress users because there is no way you can install a plugin in Blogspot. (This method works for Shopify also as you can install apps at Shopify as well)

There are free plugins like WP Smush and paid plugins like Imagify available for Wordpress users through which they can compress their images easily.

Do note, Making use of a plugin to compress images is not preferred most of the times, because most of these plugins do not compress properly like Image compression tools and Hence they do not show the same benefit as expected.

Moreover, it is always better to minimize the use of Plugins. This is because plugins themselves effect page speed a bit. The more plugins you will use, the more badly it will effect your website’s page speed.

Still, If you want to use a plugin to optimize images, WP Smush is always the best option.

This is because WP Smush is nearly a free plugin. It has some paid features also but alike other paid plugins, it does not have any limits on the number of images you compress.

Actually, most of the Image compression plugins will provide you a particular limit like you can compress only 100 Images in the free plugin version or only 1000 Images in the free plugin version but WP Smush has no such limits.

You can compress as much Images you like with the help of WP Smush.

Moreover Like Other Image Compression tools, you do not need to generate API to use WP Smush. All you need to do is to Go to Plugins section, Select Add a New Plugin Option, Search For WP Smush and then you need to install it.

After installing the plugin, you need to first activate it. After activating, you need to go to WP Smush section in the sidebar and click on Bulk Smush option to Smush Images.

That's it. This way you will be easily able to compress your images. You can even compress Images present inside a particular folder by going to Directory smush option and by selecting the folder whose media files you want to Smush.

As I mentioned above as well, though this method of compressing images is easy and convenient it is not as effective as the second method.

Method 2:- Compress Images with Help of a Online Image Compression Tool

Method 2 is always more recommended than Method 1. The reason behind this is Online Image Compression tools like Optimizilla are best to optimize your images for free.

There is no limit on the number of images you can optimize with Optimizilla and it is the best tool when it to comes to compressing images as it helps to decrease the size of an image to minimum by maintaining the excellent quality.

Compressing images with Optimizilla is always a good practice instead of making use of a Plugin. But if you own a big website which already have a lot of images which needs compression then making use of Optimizilla can be bit hectic.

This is because you will need to optimize all images one by one while using Optimizilla. After optimizing Images with Optimizilla, you need to replace them with existing images one by one.

Do note if you download an image from your website for optimization purposes, after compressing it with image compressor tools like Optimizilla you need to replace the original image with this compressed image.

For that you need to give the compressed image the same name as it was of the original image. After that you can install file manager plugin, go to the folder where the original image was stored and there you can upload this new compressed image and replace the existing image.

Apart from Optimizilla, Compressly is also a very good tool to optimize images.

Do note, you can even compress images with the help of GTmetrix itself. All you need to do is go to the warning where GTmetrix suggest you to optimize images and you can download optimized version of all images easily from there by clicking on see optimized version and saving that image.

After compression, just clear the cache (if you use a cache plugin) and retest your site with page speed testing tools and you will be able to notice a good improvement in page speed.

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