How to speed up WordPress site - images optimization, part 2.
This part of a site optimizing should improve your page loading significantly. Usually, images are the largest part of the website size that's why it is very important to compress them. You will find many excellent online tools to compress images. Look for the ones that provide the option for lossless compression - this way you will get good quality images and probably the difference will be unnoticeable.
Here are several good tools you may use for compressing images:
Image Optimizer plugins for WordPress - most recommended
The following image compressions and optimization WordPress plugins help to increase your SEO rankings without an effort - while uploading images on a website or optimizing the old ones just with the one click.
Image optimization - other suggestions
File format plays the important role, recommendations:
- JPEG - use for photos
- PNG - use for graphics (or not detailed images)
- GIF - use for simple small graphics or images
- BMP/TIFF - do not use them :)
Image resizing with CSS is not accepted by Google
If you use the same image on different sections on your site but its dimension on various pages is not equal then you should crop it as many times as many different dimensions of the same image you use. Why? Using CSS for changing image dimensions has the very bad effect on page loading testers scoring.
Example, do not use the width or height styles for changing image dimensions:
img{
width: 150px;
height: 100px;
}
Tons of images on single page effect on page loading
The more heavy images you put on one page the slowest page loading result you will get, simple :)
Someone may ask "What about galleries?" There is a solution, use plugins with lazy loading feature for images.
Use a content delivery network (CDN)
One of many benefits of using CDN is storing the static files like images for example and allow visitors downloading them from the nearer CDN servers.
Check the following free CDN services for your site:
- CloudFlare - offers an WordPress intregration plugin
- Photon - CDN service provided by JetpackJetpack
- SwarmCDN - they have free plan for 10GB of free image delivery
How to speed up WordPress site - htaccess optimization, part 1.
Do you like this short tutorial? Please share! Thanks :)