As a webmaster you should be aware of optimizing your web pages to increase speed and performance. The foremost is optimizing images on your WordPress blog that leads to increase in speed and performance of the website. Responsive WordPress design is the latest trend. Most of the websites traffic started to come from mobile and tablet devices. Optimizing your website to desktop users alone is not going to help in future. Also talking about image optimization, you can use few WordPress plugins that really help you in image optimization. Some plugins optimize your images for better SEO, by adding alt tags to images, keywords etc. You can add few WordPress plugins to support image optimization for improving website’s performance.
Here I review about best image optimization plugin for WordPress platform. It does better image optimization for web pages. As you all, SEO image optimization best practices include alt tags, keyword rich file name etc. For optimizing your website image files, here are few WordPress plugins. If you’re a WordPress beginner, read our 4 best recommended WordPress plugins for beginners that include WP super cache, all in one SEO and few more.
But before trying out these WordPress plugins, you should read our guide on optimizing your website for Speed and Performance. This guide includes all the points that a webmaster should know of.
WP Image Optimization Plugins
One of the main reasons for a slow website is the actual load the website weighs. The images that you add to your website constitutes to its speed. The more you reduce the image size, the faster the web pages load.
Resize Images after upload
This plugin is fantastic. If you’re uploading your images from digital camera that are huge in size, this plugin reduces the work of resizing it. This plugin resizes uploaded images to within a given maximum width and height after uploading, discarding the original uploaded file in the process. It eliminates your work process of resizing, saving server space etc. Large images consume huge server space and this plugin reduces size of uploaded image at point of upload then position the image to the exact size of your theme and finally deletes the original image file which is uploaded.
Similar plugin is Imsanity, it automatically resizes huge image uploads. If you’re running a multi author blog and your contributors are uploading large images, you can set the image width and height, the plugin automatically resizes all the images and uploads them. You can even batch resize images inside the plugin options.
Next Gen Gallery Plugin
If you’re trying to embed a bunch of photos to your blog, then WP gallery plugin can help you out. NextGen Gallery plugin is one of the popular gallery plugins on WordPress platform with 7 million downloads. I’ve been using picasa embed plugin that embeds the picasa album and shows the image with help of jquery to quickly load and serve images on the website. Since I shifted to NextGen, there are no regrets.
You can upload images and manage them effectively. You can rearrange, sort images and gives you option to select how you need the images to be displayed. You can either display in a slideshow format or thumbnail format. Once the visitor clicks the image thumbnail, full view will be displayed in lightbox effects and more. Slideshow format gives you option to select transition style, speed, image order, captions and more.
Alternative to NextGen gallery plugin is Grand Flash Gallery WordPress plugin. Grand flash plugin can easily embed image galleries, video, mp3 player, audio files, banners etc. It is mobile friendly and SEO optimized.
If you’re using NextGen or Grand Flash gallery plugin to embed bunch of images, you can try out Ewww Image Optimizer that automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. It can also optimize the images that you have already uploaded in the past. It uses jpegtran, opting, pngout and gifsicle image tools to optimize images. It supports both nextgen and grand flash plugins. Using this plugin, your pages will load faster, better image optimization and easy for backup and finally less bandwidth usage.
If you’re already using any image optimization plugin, do share it with us.
5 WordPress Plugins to Optimize Images on Web Pages is a post from: Madras Geek
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