Are you struggling with slow website load times and wondering why your blog keeps failing Google’s Web core vitals? You’re not alone! Many new bloggers don’t realize how important it is to optimize images for their WordPress sites.
Unoptimized images can slow down your website, frustrate visitors, and hurt your SEO rankings.
But don’t worry, this guide is here to help you easily optimize your images for a faster-loading website ☺️
Table of Contents
NOTE: All my WordPress tutorials focus on WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. If you’re curious about the differences, here’s everything you need to know ☺️
Why you need to optimize all your images
Let’s chat about why optimizing your images is super important. Imagine you’re visiting a blog, and it takes forever to load. Frustrating, right? You probably wouldn’t stick around. I know I don’t (unless I really want to read something on that site, but I still get soo annoyed… ). That’s exactly what happens to your visitors if your images aren’t optimized.
Here’s why you should care about image optimization:
Faster load times
When your website loads quickly, visitors are happier. Nobody likes waiting for pages to load, especially on mobile devices.
By optimizing your images, you reduce their file size without compromising quality, which speeds up your site. This means users get to your content faster and are more likely to stay.
Improved SEO rankings
Search engines like Google prioritize fast-loading websites. If your site is slow, it might rank lower in search results.
Optimized images contribute to a faster website, which can boost your SEO efforts. Plus, when you add relevant alt text to your images, search engines understand them better, further improving your chances of ranking higher 🙂
Better user experience
A smooth, fast website provides a better experience for your visitors. They can navigate through your site without annoying delays, making them more likely to explore your content and come back for more.
Happy visitors often lead to higher engagement rates and more conversions.
On top of that, more and more people are browsing the web on their phones. If you look at your analytics, I’m sure you’ll see it too.
However, mobile users often have slower internet connections, so a fast-loading site is crucial. Optimizing your images ensures that even mobile users can access your site quickly and easily, improving their overall experience.
Google cares a lot about user experience, so again, an SEO boost 🙂
Reduced bounce rates
If your site takes too long to load, visitors might leave before it even finishes loading. This is known as a “bounce.” High bounce rates can hurt your site’s performance and credibility.
Saving server resources
Large, unoptimized images can eat up a lot of server bandwidth. This not only slows down your site but can also increase your hosting costs.
By optimizing your images, you reduce the amount of data your server has to handle, making your site more efficient and cost-effective.
Professional appearance
A fast, well-optimized site just looks more professional. Visitors are more likely to trust and engage with a site that loads quickly and smoothly. It shows you care about their experience and have put effort into making your site the best it can be.
So, by optimizing your images, you’re not just speeding up your site. You’re improving SEO, enhancing the user experience, reducing bounce rates, saving resources, and making your site accessible and professional 🙂
Optimizing the images before uploading them to WordPress
Did you know that you should optimize your images before you upload them to WordPress? By optimizing your images beforehand, you can significantly reduce their file size.
Here’s how to optimize your images before uploading them:
Choose the right dimensions for your images
Uploading overly large images can significantly slow down your site. Most of the time, you don’t need a 4000×3000 pixel image if it’s going to be displayed at 800×600 pixels.
Resizing your images to the exact dimensions they will be displayed in helps save space and speed up load times.
Check your theme’s settings to find out how wide your blog’s content area is. This will ensure your images fit perfectly without being too large or too small.
Also, look at the dimensions for images in widget areas if you plan to use them there. It doesn’t make sense to upload a 1500px wide image into a 300px area 🙂
Additionally, consider the specific image sizes required for different sections of your site, like sales pages, headers, and featured images.
Sales pages often need higher-quality, larger images to showcase products effectively, while blog post images might be smaller.
Knowing these measurements will help you create images that look great and load quickly.
How to easily resize your images:
You can use tools like Adobe Photoshop, but there are very good online tools that will get the job done. If you Google it, you will get a list of tools to choose from.
Personally, I love Squoosh – it’s from Google and lets you resize and compress your image in one setting. You can even choose the output format.
Select the best format: JPEG, PNG, or WebP
Choosing the right image format can make a big difference in your website’s performance. When I started blogging, I used to upload all my images as PNGs. Totally unnecessary. They were all huge, and I had to spend several hours manually swiping them for optimized formats.
- JPEG: Best for photographs and images with lots of colors. It compresses well and keeps file sizes smaller while maintaining quality. Use them for blog post images, product photos, and other detailed images.
- PNG: Ideal for images with transparent backgrounds and simpler graphics like logos. It retains higher quality but results in larger file sizes.
- WebP: A newer format that provides superior compression and quality. It’s supported by most modern browsers and is a great choice if you’re looking to optimize further. Use it whenever possible for all types of images to take advantage of better compression rates. You can also use it for images with transparent backgrounds.
I would recommend using WebP format for all your images.
Compress your images before you upload them
Compression reduces the file size of your images without compromising too much on quality. Smaller file sizes mean faster load times and a better user experience.
My aim is to have all my JPEG images under 150 MB before I upload them.
Again, there are several tools you can use to compress your images before uploading them to WordPress:
- Squoosh: Has several good functions you can use, but doesn’t support bulk compression
- IloveIMG: Has a whole suite of tools you can use
- TinyPNG: A free online tool that compresses PNG and JPEG files effectively
- Compress jpeg: Bulk compress jpegs and png files
- Imagecompressor: Another great free online tool for compressing images
Now that your images are the right size and compressed, you can upload them to your WordPress Media library 🙂
Optimizing images in your WordPress
Now that you’ve got your images optimized before uploading, let’s focus on fine-tuning them within your WordPress.
Enable lazy loading for faster load times
Lazy loading is a technique that helps your website load faster by only loading images when they are about to be seen by the user.
Normally, when someone visits your site, all images load at once, which slows down the page, especially if there are many images.
With lazy loading, images only load as the user scrolls down the page, which means the initial load time is much quicker. This way, your readers don’t have to wait as long for the page to display. And it also saves data for those on mobile devices or slower connections.
To enable lazy loading on your WordPress site, you can use a plugin like Smush or WP Rocket.
Actually, having a good optimizing plugin is a must, especially if you use shared hosting 🙂 Find one that will also have a lazy loading feature.
Most of these plugins are easy to install and configure with just a few clicks (and have great tutorials). Once activated, the plugins automatically handle the lazy loading for your images, so you don’t have to do any coding. This way, you can enjoy a faster website without needing to understand the technical details behind it.
Just install the plugin, activate it, and let it do the work for you! ☺️
Use an image optimization plugin
If manually optimizing images sounds like too much work, you can try using an image optimization plugin. But keep in mind that not even the best image optimization plugin can save you if your images are huge 🤷♀️
There are several very good plugins that can automatically optimize your images for you. Most of them offer bulk optimization and different output formats.
Here’s a look at some of the best image optimization plugins for WordPress:
- Smush: It automatically compresses and resizes images as you upload them. It also has a lazy load function 🙂
- Imagify: Imagify is another powerful plugin that offers automatic image optimization. It provides different compression levels, so you can choose the balance between quality and file size that works best for you. It has a free and paid version, depending on how many images you need to optimize per month. The paid version is good and affordable.
- ShortPixel: ShortPixel is known for its powerful compression algorithms that offer both lossy and lossless optimization. Again, they have a free and paid version. But you also have the option to buy “credits” if you don’t want to pay a monthly fee.
- EWWW Image Optimizer: I tried all of the above, and currently I’m using this plugin for one of my blogs. While my images are optimized, they are not in webp format. This plugin converts them to webp for free 🙂
Using these plugins can greatly simplify the process of image optimization, especially if you can export already compressed and optimized images from tools like Photoshop or Gimp.
Using CDN for image optimization
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores copies of your website’s content, including images, on servers distributed around the world. When a user visits your site, the CDN delivers the content from the server closest to them, reducing the distance data has to travel.
This process significantly speeds up load times, enhancing the user experience. CDNs do not just speed up image delivery; they can improve the performance of your entire website.
Popular CDN providers include Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, and StackPath, which offer easy integration with WordPress sites.
I use Cloudflare for my websites – it’s amazing and free! It offers great features that enhance website performance and security. Setting it up for your blog is simple and can make a noticeable difference in speed and reliability, so there’s really no reason not to give it a try! 😊
Give these tips a try and see for yourself the difference in your website’s performance 🚀
A faster website not only makes your visitors happy but also helps your site rank higher in search engines.
I had to learn the hard way how important image optimization is and how it can slow down your website, I created Image Optimization 101 – a step-by-step course that walks you through everything you need to know about optimizing images for your WordPress site, even when you’re not tech savvy.
Through short, easy-to-follow video tutorials, you’ll learn exactly how to resize, compress, and format your images so they look amazing and load lightning fast. Plus, I’ll show you how to do it all with free, beginner-friendly tools – no paid software required ☺️
No more blurry photos. No more slow pages. No more confusion. Just a clear, step-by-step plan to get your images working for you, not against you.
Happy blogging! ❣️
