ThemeGrill EditorialAre you searching for the best WordPress image optimizer plugin to compress the image without losing its quality? If so, this article is for you.
Using images to visualize, advertise and portray various information is the best way to let the audience know the content better. But using too many images may lead to many other disadvantages.
From slowing down your site’s speed to losing the qualitative user experience, all might occur when using large and multiple images.
So, we’ve compiled the 11 best image optimizer plugins to compress images on your WordPress site.
Let’s start by knowing what image optimization is and why it is important.
What is Image Optimization, and Why is It Necessary?
Image optimization is the process of reducing the file size of the images to the lowest while keeping the quality intact. It ensures that you’ve got high-quality images in the smallest size possible.
So, optimizing images enables you to get images with perfect file sizes that don’t hinder your site’s performance.
Below, we’ve listed the major benefits of optimizing images.
- Reduces page load times and improves overall website speed
- Improves user experience
- Reduces space usage on your server
- Better ranking opportunities for your images in Google Image Search
- Improves site traffic (as a result of the benefits mentioned above)
Thus, optimizing the images before you upload them to your site is important.
Why Do You Need WordPress Image Optimizer Plugins?
First, using large images decreases the free space on your server. Next, too many images on a single page and post can also increase your site’s loading time.
So, you should optimize your site’s images as much as possible without reducing their quality.
For this, you can use some image editing software before uploading the images to your WordPress site. But that’s a hassle because not everyone is comfortable using the software.
Therefore, the best option is to use WordPress image optimizer plugins.
It’s an easy approach to image optimization that you can use on any WordPress site. You can do everything from image resizing to changing image extensions using the plugins.
So, without further ado, let’s look at the best free and paid image optimizer WordPress plugin available on the WordPress market.
11 Best WordPress Image Optimizer Plugins for 2023
1. Smush
Smush is one of the most popular and best free image optimizer WordPress plugins, created to compress and optimize images.
This award-winning plugin takes pride in its capability of compressing images on your server automatically with minimal loss of quality.
The plugin scans all images on your website, monitors future uploads, and quickly strips unneeded data from the images, compresses them, and even resizes them if necessary.
Smush can also compress images specified in a given folder. Additionally, it’s compatible with NextGen Gallery, WPML, WP Retina 2x, and many other image-related plugins.
Key Features:
- Lossless and Smush lossy image compression for optimizing image sizes with no slowdown
- Compatible with JPEG, GIF, and PNG image files
- Lets you set maximum width/height for images, and images larger than the parameters will be automatically rescaled
- Automatic optimization on image upload
- Allows image optimization on the entire network and easily compresses images on multiple websites with global and individual settings
Pricing:
Smush is a freemium plugin, i.e., it’s available in both free and premium versions.
You can easily download free Smush from WordPress.org and get the premium version from the official site. Smush Pro offers a free trial for 7 days, then you’ve to pay $7.50 per month.
2. Imagify
Imagify is a powerful and best WordPress image optimizer plugin available on the web.
It lets you compress images using three different compression methods with varying degrees of image size optimization and quality change.
Along with your media uploads, you can also optimize thumbnails and retina images as well. It’s fully compatible with WP Retina x2, WooCommerce, and various media gallery tools.
The tool lets you delete or preserve EXIF data if necessary. It even has a backup option to save your optimized images if you’re unsatisfied with the image optimization.
This beginner-friendly plugin ensures that you don’t have to do anything at all; use the plugin and watch as your site optimization soar.
Key Features:
- Lossless, Lossy, and Ultra lossy compression algorithms for varying degrees of image optimization
- Automatically backs up optimized images for restoring or re-optimizing
- Supports PNG, JPG, and GIF formats
- Provides multi-site support
- Directly resizes images before upload, saving time and space
Pricing:
Imagify is yet another freemium plugin on our list. So, you can download the free plugin from WordPress.org and purchase the premium from the official site.
It has two pricing plans as follows:
- Growth: $4.99/month
- Infinite: $9.99/month
3. Optimole
Optimole is the best WordPress image optimizer plugin that makes your site lightweight by reducing images’ size without visually altering them.
It resizes, compresses, and serves your images via CDN anywhere. Besides, Optimole works on autopilot. That means once installed, it’ll do its job all alone.
All the images are processed through lossless and lossy optimization techniques.
Further, Optimole also has premium plans that offer more viewing bandwidth, disk space, CDN locations, priority support, etc.
Key Features:
- Images are served via CDN, covering more than 110 server locations worldwide
- Automatic optimization
- Retina and HiDPI support dynamic DPR detection on all devices
- Easy tracking and monitoring of the stats/results via a modern dashboard
- It uses lazy loading to display images
Pricing:
Optimole is also available in both free and premium versions.
You can download the free version from WordPress.org. However, for more advanced image optimization features, you can also opt-in to its premium plans as follows:
- Starter: $19.08/month (Billed Yearly)
- Business: $90.83/month (Billed Yearly)
- Custom: Custom Pricing
4. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer helps you improve your website’s reception and popularity using the power of image compression.
This WordPress image optimizer plugin allows you to compress your images on the best compression ratio for JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF files.
The correct compression is automatically selected based on the file format as well. Further, the plugin also comes with complete SSL protection for your files.
Moreover, you can also choose between image optimization to be done on your server or a specialized server. Besides, you can bulk optimize images, from many images to entire folders.
EWWW image optimizer is also fully compatible with WP Image editor, WEBP images, WP-CLI, etc.
Key Features:
- Unlimited file size for compression, no speed limits, background optimization
- Free image backups save your original images for 30 days
- Automatic image resizing with basic retina support and automatic lossless compression
- Compress images from plugins as well, BuddyPress avatars and images, Meta slider slides, GD bbPress attachments, and user-specified folders
- CDN support for uploading to cloud servers
Pricing:
EWWW Image Optimizer is also available in both free and premium versions.
A free plugin can be downloaded from WordPress.org. The paid version is available on its official website. It has three different pricing plans as follows:
- Standard: $7/month for 1 Site
- Growth: $15/month for 10 Sites
- Infinite: $25/month for Unlimited Sites
5. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Another best free image optimizer plugin for WordPress is ShortPixel Image Optimizer. This GDPR-ready plugin is lightweight and features the concept of automation.
Install the plugin and forget about image sizes, as it automatically compresses and resizes older images while scanning for newer ones.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer takes minimal resources to drop the load on your web servers and works great on a shared cloud network, VPS, or dedicated web hosting.
You can also optimize images on your media libraries or any images sent through FTP.
Bulk optimization is also freely available for all users with the restore feature in case the compression is not to your liking.
Additionally, you can easily test your images’ optimization parameters and quality with a single click.
Key Features:
- Bulk optimization option for existing images in the media library or in any gallery
- PNG to JPG auto-conversion
- Compatible with WebP, WP Retina 2x, various image galleries, WooCommerce, and WooCommerce plugins
- Multi-site integration with a single API key
- Compatible with watermarking plugins
Pricing:
You can download the free ShortPixel Image Optimizer from the official WordPress plugin repository.
Likewise, you get its paid version from the official site. Its premium pricing starts from $4.99/month.
6. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is a free online image compression tool. However, it’s also available as a WordPress plugin.
The plugin compresses your images, thus optimizing your images and gallery without affecting your overall site speed.
It allows automatic image optimization for your newer uploads and bulk optimization for compressing older images.
The plugin also preserves metadata, creation dates, copyright information, and GPS location. Thus, it ensures you can take full credit for all the images uploaded to your site.
You can also monitor your image compression data and statistics using the Dashboard Widget offered by the plugin.
Furthermore, the plugin is also made to optimize color profiles. It converts images to standard RGB color profiles to conserve space and maximize compatibility.
Key Features:
- No file size limits for image optimization
- Copyright metadata, creation date, and GPS location are preserved after conversion
- Supports animated PNG and GIF formats
- Supports multi-site optimization through a single API key
- Provides a dashboard widget to monitor usage and compression statistics
Pricing:
TinyPNG is a free-to-use WordPress plugin that you can download from WordPress.org.
However, you can also use its free online tool or become its web pro user at $39 (for a yearly subscription).
7. Imsanity
Imsanity is another best free image optimizer WordPress plugin that automatically resizes huge image uploads.
You can choose whatever size and quality of the image, and Imsanity does the rest of the task.
Whenever a contributor uploads an image to your site, Imsanity automatically brings it down to the configured size and replaces the original image.
You can also resize the images that have been previously uploaded to your site using bulk-resize features and free up your disk space.
On the other hand, you can also resize individual images through the Media Library’s List View.
The plugin is perfect for blogs that don’t use original high-resolution images. It’s also ideal for those who don’t want to scale each image before uploading.
Key Features:
- Allows to set the configuration of maximum width, height, and JPG quality
- Converts BMP and PNG images file to JPG for more savings
- No further attention is required on the part of the user after the installation
- Includes WordPress built-in image scaling functions
- Available in several languages
Pricing:
Imsanity is a free WordPress image compression plugin. So you can easily download it from WordPress.org.
8. Optimus
Next on the list, we have Optimus, an outstanding WordPress image optimizer plugin. It’s developed by KeyCDN, a global content delivery platform.
Optimus can reduce the image size by up to 70%. It optimizes not only the images but also the thumbnails and preview images.
On top of that, the overall quality of the images is always maintained by the plugin.
Every file you compress with Optimus is followed by an instant deletion from its server. So you don’t have to worry about your data being stored on its server.
Optimus also provides premium versions with expanded functionality; you can choose the plan accordingly. Overall, optimization with Optimus is quick and easy.
Key Features:
- Reduces file size during upload
- No adjustments to the code are required
- Compatible with WooCommerce and WordPress multi-site
- Transparent data privacy policy
- Supports WordPress Mobile Apps and Windows Live Writer
Pricing:
Optimus comes in both free and premium versions.
A free version can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository. Likewise, you can visit the official site to purchase its premium plans.
- Optimus HQ: $29/year (One Time Charge)
- Optimus HQ Plus: $149/year (One Time Charge)
9. WP Compress
WP Compress has also grabbed a position on our list of best free image optimizer WordPress plugins.
It’s an all-in-one image optimization plugin that automatically reduces image size in WordPress sites, shrinks file size, and improves load times to boost conversions.
Further, based on the visitor’s device, it’ll adapt your images to be in the right size without any visible quality difference.
Also, it supports retina devices and generates retina images whenever possible. This provides a high-resolution experience to the users.
You can simply start by linking your website, and that’s all; you don’t have to worry about maintenance after setup.
Key Features:
- Live image optimization
- Lossless, intelligent, and ultra-compression modes are available
- Prevents over-compression
- One-click bulk optimization and restore
- Regular updates
Pricing:
A free version of WP Compress is available from WordPress.org.
Similarly, you can view its premium plans from the official site. It offers three different pricing plans as follows:
- Starter: $9/month
- Professional: $29/month
- Whitelabel: $49/month
10. resmush.it
reSmush.it is a free WordPress image optimizer tool based on the API with the same name.
The plugin can help you reduce the size of your images, animated or not, through several algorithms. It allows you to optimize images, either individually or in bulk.
Instead of choosing between different algorithms, you can define the compression level simply using the optimization level feature.
Moreover, this free WordPress image compression plugin works by creating a copy and working on it, thus providing you with backups to restore.
Furthermore, the plugin is a complete package for image optimization, with its only restriction being its 5MB file size limit.
Key Features:
- Completely free and easy-to-use design
- Supports compression individually, in bulk, as well as automatic compression on upload
- Choose the optimum compression level as necessary using the image quality value setting
- Saves statistics and logs on image compression
- Saves the backup on optimization for restoration if needed
Pricing:
reSmush.it is a free plugin that you can download from WordPress.org.
11. Kraken Image Optimizer
Last but not the least, we have Kraken Image Optimizer on our list of the best WordPress image optimizer plugins.
The plugin enables you to optimize, compress, and resize your images using Kraken.io Image Optimizer’s API.
It’s a reliable WordPress image optimizer plugin that supports several file types like JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Not to mention that it also supports animated GIFs for compression.
Best of all, it allows both lossless and lossy compression of the images. Further, the plugin optimizes all the images uploaded through the media uploader on-the-fly, along with the generated thumbnails.
Key Features:
- Option to optimize image individually or in a bulk
- Resize image uploads with large dimension
- Automatic orientation of images, no need to rotate manually
- Allows image optimization via Command Line Interface for advanced users
- Works great with WP Engine hosted blogs
Pricing:
Kraken Image Optimizer is a free plugin. So you can easily download it from WordPress.org.
However, you can also sign up for a free Kraken.io account or subscribe to its pro plan, which starts at $5 per month.
Wrapping It Up!
Thus, you can use any of these best WordPress image optimizer plugins to compress images and improve your website performance without any image editing skills.
You can also upgrade your plan from free to premium in some plugins if you want to add other functionalities.
We hope we’ve made your task less tiring and more productive with our top WordPress image optimizer plugins list. If you have any confusion or queries, you can leave your comment below.
You can also explore more articles on WordPress-related topics through our blog. We have amazing articles on how to speed up your WordPress site, boost WordPress site speed using CDN, and more.
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