The Best Image Optimization Tools for WordPress (and Why You Need Them) | EP 670

The Best Image Optimization Tools for WordPress (and Why You Need Them)

1. Imagify  02:31
2. WP Squish  03:30

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 David Blackmon: Hey everybody. Welcome to another episode of wp the podcast i’m David Blackmon

00:35 Tim Strifler: And I’m Tim Strifler.

00:36  David Blackmon: And if you’ve listened to the last two episodes and my audio was utter [ __ ] . It’s because i tried to get too smart and put on some bluetooth headphones and they switched and my audio, went not through this amazing Shure SM7B it went through my dang headphones. So I apologize for that but i’m making it up to you because today we have an amazing topic, the best image optimization tools for WordPress and why you need them. We’ve got two of them that we’re going to recommend and both of them are free if i’m not mistaken and one of them may even have a paid version as well, and that’s the one that Tim’s going to talk about and guess what, Tim i know it says i’m supposed to go first but i’m mixing it up on WP The Podcast because that’s how we roll yeah i’m throwing it in your lap you’re first. 

01:26 Tim Strifler: Sounds good. Well i’m gonna go ahead and answer the why you need them before we talk about our recommendations. And it’s pretty obvious but images are big right you upload an image whether that’s a photo from your iphone or an image you download from a stock photo site or whatever chances are it’s going to be bigger than you need it. And so what a image optimization plugin is going to do is it’s going to compress the image it’s going to strip out data in the image file that isn’t needed for what what you’re using it for and it’s going to make the the photo a lot lighter that’s going to make your page load a lot faster so image optimization plugins are really really important. It’s the type of thing that you should be installing in every website you build because it does the heavy lifting for you. Once you install it it will do the compression you can dial in your settings a little bit or just use the default settings in a lot of cases and it’s going to make your photos smaller and make your website load faster. And so the one that i use and i recommend is uh a plug-in called the Imagify. Now the reason why i use it and recommend it is it is made by WP Rocket which is my uh recommend recommend recommended caching and performance optimization plugin for WordPress, and that’s what i use in all my sites. And so Imagify it’s made by the same company it integrates it makes it really easy so it actually does not have a free version it’s only paid but it’s very affordable and so yeah so they they compress the images on their servers so it’s not going to use your server resources to to do that uh compression.  The compression algorithms and all of that so imagify it’s by the same people that created WP Rocket and it’s awesome.

03:16 David Blackmon:  Awesome well i’m going to give you my favorite image optimization plugin and it’s by this amazing company called Aspen Grove Studios which hit hint i have a little bit to do with this is actually one of our products. It’s WP Squish. It’s a WordPress image compression tool and i’m not going to repeat everything of the why of why you need to do it and stuff, i want to tell you a little bit about the plugin. First of all it’s free, it’s in the repository WordPress.org you can get it there or you can go over to aspenggrovestudios.com our website and download it there for free. It’s not going to cost you a thing and one of the things that um you know the benefits of of WP Squish is um it lets the user set the jpeg compression levels uh you know full size image resolution limits for uploaded images so that ensures that any of your images that are uploaded to your media library get automatically resized and compressed as desired before being stored on the server and stuff so WP Imagify does it on you know their servers and stuff before you put it on your server and whatnot and ours does basically the same thing as well inside the tool and stuff so there’s tons of different settings that you can go in and set the size of the image at the compression level. And there are many many tutorials blog posts and even on the product pages for WP Squish they’ll have recommended settings and stuff, so check it out . It’s free doesn’t cost anything a very minimalistic interface. It’s not overwhelming, even a new person can use it.  You’re going to go in and be able to download it install it and use it right out of the box, pretty easily and if you’re a knucklehead like a man like me and you don’t like reading instructions you can even work it too just gonna put that out there. So uh all right Tim?

05:20 Tim Strifler:  I‘m gonna have to check that out because i have not used it uh and um yeah again i mentioned i use imagifly just because that’s what i’ve used for years now but um yeah i’m gonna have to give wp squish a try because… 

05:36 David Blackmon: and it’s free it’s right yeah it’s a great product actually it’s um it’s it’s one of the ones that we probably should be charging for um but we don’t so there you go go get it for free tomorrow we’ve got another great topic how to track activity for all users on your wordpress website tim until tomorrow we’ll see you then

04:52  Tim Strifler: Take care bye-bye