Speeding up your site through image compression? What would be the best choice?

Image compression is a process of downsizing images used on your websites, most of the time without losing the quality of an image/picture. By reducing the size, you save your bandwidth and more importantly your sites’ speed will increase significantly. Lesser the size, the lesser download time.

How important is to compress the images on your sites?

Let’s do a simple math. On average, there will be 2 images per page on our site. Consider each was 300kb of size (usually much bigger than this), later reduced to 100kb saving 200kb in compression. So on a single page, 400kb of data is reduced for downloading by each visitors to the site. Apparently, it can reduce page load time significantly for any user visiting giving a good experience too. Another math, consider the same page is at least viewed by 100 different users a day, it can save up to 40mb of bandwidth (also reducing server load). When considered for a whole site, it can save few GB’s of data every month. So in every way, it is good to implement this on your site.

What are the choices available for a WordPress based site?

Whoa! There is a handful of plugins and services available to do the job well. I am not going to talk about them all or compare to confuse you. But for the note, I’ve been trying few of them for past few months including the top plugins WP-Smush, reSmush it, Ewww and some more. I am not convinced with any of them until I test ShortPixel.

ShortPixel, the answer.

All were offering the same amount of job, comparatively Ewww and WP-Smush performed well in terms of quality along with ShortPixel. To be frank, ShortPixel’s price model made to go for it. i.e. 10000 image compression for $9.99. There are monthly plans also available, but I find one-time plans suits my need and cost-efficient. The same quantity will cost me $30 in Ewww and much more in other services. There’s a perfect balance between the price and quality made me move towards SmartPixel today. One more additional advantage is, if the compression for a image is below 5%, then it is considered as free, that will not count even in the free plan. SmartPixel does the job fine. Few more additional features that come handy with the plugin for WordPress are, you won’t lose your original upload images after compression because those all were placed in a separate folder on your server, in case if anything goes wrong you can always restore them and re-compress or anything like that. SmartPixel also supports Cloudflare by notifying about the changes made to the images, so Cloudflare always serves the latest version of the images.

Don’t want to pay?

Don’t worry if you have ‘starter’ blog/site. SmartPixel is offering 100 free compressions every month. For most small sized blogs, it is sufficient. If your site needs more than that than it also means you have to go for pro no matter what plugin you may use. reSmush.it is still a free option that you will not regret. But for some reason, I not comfortable with that. It’s your choice finally.

Have something in mind?

Just ask me in the comment section below.