How To Do Image Optimization (2024): Compress Images Automatically

Have you been wondering how to compress images automatically for blog posts?

In this post I’ll share the following on image optimization:

  • What compressing and optimizing images does
  • Key benefits of compressing images
  • How to compress images automatically for your website
  • Best WordPress image optimization plugins

Let’s jump on in!

How To Compress Images Automatically For Blog Posts

What Does It Mean To Compress Images & Optimize Them?

Image compression reduces the file size of an image.  Typically, you might have an image an a JPEG or PNG format which will be a large file size.

Using JPEG and PNG files for images is therefore not optimal for web design or for use on a website.

Instead, compressing images is done for images on websites in one of the following three ways (Lossy vs Lossless vs Glossy compression):

  1. Lossy Compression – The highest compression rate of images resulting in a more coarse looking image but still stays true to the original.
  2. Glossy Compression – The middle compression rate between lossy and lossless that reduces the file size some but maintains a more fine texture to the image when compared to lossy.
  3. Lossless Compression – The lowest compression rate with some reduction in image file size but focused on high quality images being maintained.  Site speed will only be minimally improved in comparison to using lossy compression.

Why are these three types of compression important?

Well, because when you go to choose a plugin to use for your own website or blog it’s important to choose the right type of compression and image optimization that fits your needs specifically.

If you’re a photography blogger, it’s probably best to go with lossless or glossy and steer clear of using lossy compression on all the images for your site.

Other than that, choosing the compression rate is usually a single setting that can be applied to all the images across your site when using a plugin for image compression and optimization.

How To Compress Images Automatically For Your Website (Optimize Images For The Web)

One of the great things about compressing images for online usage and for your website is that it doesn’t have to be done manually for every single image that you upload.

In fact, sites such as Facebook and Reddit have built-in compression of images to automatically optimize images.

Now, how do can you automatically compress images for your own blog or WordPress website?

I personally use a plugin called ShortPixel.

In fact here’s the latest stats on how much data storage and space I’ve saved across my website by compressing image with ShortPixel.

ShortPixel Image Compression and Optimization Stats

As you can see I’ve saved a ton of space and bandwidth.

In short, this means that every visitor to my site gets to view my pages faster, and I’ll get a lower bounce rate overall for my site as well.

Key Benefits Of Compressing Images & Formatting

I’ve already mentioned a few benefits of compressing and optimizing images, but wanted to share the full list of key benefits I’ve found.

Here’s the list of benefits of compressing images for a website:

  • Page load speed improved – The number one benefit for image compression would be improvements with your page load speed.  An image heavy page can drag down a page load time especially if the images are not optimized properly.  Compressing your images that you upload to your website will therefore greatly improve page load speed.
  • Potentially lower bounce rate – Any time you decrease the time it takes for a page to load on your site, you’re inevitably going to decrease your bounce rate.  For instance, if the site takes seemingly forever to load then a potential visitor might exit before even really giving a chance for you site to load fully.  This is something that you obviously want to avoid at all cost and image compression can help you do just that.
  • Improved SEO – By decreasing bounce rate and improving page load speed, you’re also improving the SEO of your site.  Since more visitors are coming to your site and staying on it longer without bouncing, it’s likely that your pages will start to rank higher in Google all because of the image compression.
  • Smaller storage required for backups of your site – Images can at times become huge file sizes nowadays.  With higher quality cameras being innovated at practically lightspeed, it’s important to know that by compressing images you’ll also get the added benefit of reducing site backup storage size.  
  • Bandwidth reduction – The networks that are used to access your blog or website use up bandwidth every time a visitor comes to visit your site.  Compressing images is great in this case once again, since it reduces the bandwidth.
  • Slower devices rejoice – If you’ve got a slow device, then you can probably relate.  There’s nothing more annoying than a super slow loading web page.  There’s a high likelihood you’ll simply hit the back button and choose the next best site in Google’s SERP if things are simply taking too long to load.  Thankfully, compressing images will make your visitors that much more happy and more likely to visit and stay on your site to view your content.

Best Image Optimization Tools & Software

There’s a lot of great image optimization tools out there. 

A lot of them work ok… but the one that I’ve found to be the best is TinyPNG.

Compress Images Using TinyPNG

Here’s a full list of the other tools I’ve found that work well for image optimization and compression:

I recommend trying out a few of the image optimization software above and then settling on one to go with.  These tools are great for one-off quick tasks that need to be done fast.  So, it’s probably best to bookmark the one that you choose in your browser as well for fast access. 🙂👍

Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins

Believe it or not, there’s a ton of different WordPress plugins that you can choose from to compress the images for your site.

The great part is that they work to automatically compress the images for your website so that you don’t have to every single image manually (talk about going crazy… 😛).

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel Image OptimizerI personally use the ShortPixel WordPress image optimizer plugin, which automatically compresses images and tons of other additional features that many other plugins simply don’t have.

Here’s a look at the ShortPixel pricing for one-time fees.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer Pricing

The ShortPixel pricing plans are: 

  • One Time 10K Images – Costs $9.99
    • priority support
    • easy to use
    • no file size limit
    • one API key for multiple sites
    • lossless, glossy, and lossy optimization
    • automatic and bulk optimization
    • WordPress plugin
    • PHP compression tools
  • One Time 30K Images – Costs $19.99
    • 10,000 bonus images included
    • priority support
    • easy to use
    • no file size limit
    • one API key for multiple sites
    • lossless, glossy, and lossy optimization
    • automatic and bulk optimization
    • WordPress plugin
    • PHP compression tools
  • One Time 50K Images – Costs $29.99
    • 20,000 bonus images included
    • priority support
    • easy to use
    • no file size limit
    • one API key for multiple sites
    • lossless, glossy, and lossy optimization
    • automatic and bulk optimization
    • WordPress plugin
    • PHP compression tools
  • One Time 170K Images – Costs $99
    • 70,000 bonus images included
    • priority support
    • easy to use
    • no file size limit
    • one API key for multiple sites
    • lossless, glossy, and lossy optimization
    • automatic and bulk optimization
    • WordPress plugin
    • PHP compression tools

Optimole Image Optimizer

Optimole PluginOptimole is a great image optimization plugin that actually is optimized to work well with the Elementor page builder.

  • You can check out my Elementor review if you’re interested in learning more about it.

It includes a CDN for your images to be served from over 200 different locations worldwide using Cloudfront servers.  Lazy loading is also built in and retina images and WebP images are created automatically.

In terms of pricing for Optimole, there’s actually a free plan that I recommend you get started on to try out if you’re interested.

Here’s what’s included with the Optimole free plan:

  • 5,000 visits monthly
  • auto scaled images
  • smart lazy-loading
  • Cloudfront CDN (200+ locations)
  • Unmetered bandwidth
  • Email support within 48 hours

Imagify Image Optimizer

Imagify PluginImagify is a great WordPress plugin to compress and optimize your images.

You’ll be able to optimize your images in bulk and also switch between different levels of compression for all your images across the site once you download and install the WordPress plugin.

There’s both a free version and a premium version of the Imagify WordPress plugin.  The free version allows you to optimize up to 25 MB of images per month, which comes to about 250 images give or take.  Anything more and you’ll have to start paying for Imagify.

WP Smush

WP Smush WordPress PluginSmush is another highly recommended image optimization WordPress plugin that also allows you to bulk compress images and use lazy loading for your site.

Some of the additional features that Smush includes are:

  • Bulk optimization
  • Lazy loading
  • image resizing
  • No monthly limits on data for image optimization
  • Compatible with multiple sites
  • All types of image files can be processed
  • Convert images to WebP

Best Practices When Optimizing Images On A Blog Or Website

When it comes to compressing images and optimizing them for your website, there’s a few main things that should be done.

By following the best practices for image optimization, you can start to see a decrease in your page load time site-wide and ultimately reap the SEO benefits.

You’ll likely get a lower bounce rate and start to see a slightly higher time on page.

So, here’s a list of the best practices for optimizing images on a website:

  • Use Lossy compression for your images wherever possible
  • Invest in a paid plugin to automate image optimization if needed
  • Play around with settings inside the plugins to figure out what works best for your specific website
  • PNG images should only be used if you need high detail and high resolution images
  • Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to speed up the delivery of your images from web servers all around the world
  • Remove any image data that is unnecessary
  • Test your images to make sure they appear properly after publishing a blog post or page on your site
  • Use web fonts instead of encoding text inside images
  • Use vector images if you want them to be zoom independent (look the same when zoomed in instead of all blurry)
  • Use raster images if you’ve got a complex image with intricate details

Frequently Asked Questions About Image Compression

The best way to compress images fast for you website would be to use an image optimization plugin.  By using a plugin, you can bulk compress and optimize images all at once and automatically upon uploading them to your site.  This helps tremendously to automate a task that would otherwise be tedious and time consuming to say the least.  

You can compress images for your website by either using a tool to typically compress images one at a time or install a WordPress plugin to compress your images automatically upon upload.  Additionally, these plugins usually have a content delivery network to serve your image from all around the world and deliver them to your visitors wherever they’re at.

The best way to optimize image speed is to compress images at a lossy compression rate to achieve the smallest file size for each image.  The smaller file size will allow the page to load and images to load faster and ultimately decrease the bounce rate of visitors to a website.

Final Thoughts On Image Optimization

There’s a lot to image optimization if you really think about it.

However, the great news is that if you’ve got your own WordPress website then it’s pretty easy to install a plugin, change a few settings, and be up and running to compress images in a matter of minutes.

Being able to decrease the page load time across your site is key to having long-term growth overall both in terms of ranking in the search engines, but also to aid in the growth of your business and revenue.

Now I want to hear from you… How will you be compressing images on your site?  Did you find a plugin that I mentioned to use for image optimization or do you already have a favorite?  And are you planning on primarily optimizing your images using the tools as one-off tasks or in bulk for your own site using one of the WordPress plugins?  Let me know in the comments below! 🙂👍

Affiliate Disclaimer

I hope you enjoyed this post. This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to purchase through my links at no additional cost to you.

  • Dylan Gordon says:

    Great guide David! I’ve been using ShortPixel as well and it makes such a big difference. I’ll have to test out a few of your other recommendations too!

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