Image Compression – The Easiest Way to Speed up Your WordPress Site

by Lars Miller | Aug 6, 2019

If your WordPress site has large imagery on it, the best thing you can do to reduce page abandonment and help SEO is to compress your images.

How Does Image Compression Help Reduce Page Abandonment?

When a webpage loads from the internet, your browser is downloading all the files that make up that page from a server. These files include .html, .js, .css, .png, .jpg, .svg, and so on. Often times, it’s the images that carry the heaviest weight of the download, in this case, measured in bytes. The more bytes, the longer a file takes to download. Image compression leaves an image that virtually looks the same, but at a significantly reduced file size. Smaller file sizes mean your webpage loads faster.

Faster webpages mean more engaged users while also appealing to Google’s ranking mechanisms (SEO).

How to Compress Your WordPress Images

There are a number of image compression plugins for WordPress. Many of them are bundled with other features such as lazy loading and caching. Right now, we use Compress JPEG & PNG images. It has settings to do both bulk optimizations and compress when uploading images.

Try their online drag and drop tool here: https://tinypng.com/. It’s incredible to see the difference in the output. The output file sizes are often reduced 40-80% from the input.