5 Best Image Compression Plugins for WordPress 2022

Are you searching for the best image compression plugins for WordPress to compress the image without losing its quality? If so, this article listing the best WordPress image optimizers is just for you.

Using images to visualize, advertise and portray various information is the best way to let the audience know the content better. But using too many images may open the door to numerous other disadvantages.

From slowing down your WordPress site’s speed to losing the qualitative user experience, all might occur when using large and multiple images. So, we’ve come up with the 5 Best Image Compression Plugins for WordPress to compress images on your WordPress site.

Let’s start by knowing why you need WordPress Image Compression Plugins.

Why Do You Need WordPress Image Compression Plugins?

First, using large images decreases the free space on your server. Next, too many images on a single post and page can also increase your site’s loading time. This discourages the audience from spending time on your website. Since the loading time is also directly related to ranking on the search engine, it’s a huge disadvantage.

Therefore, you should optimize your site’s images as much as possible without reducing their quality. And for this, you could use some image editing software before uploading the images to your WordPress site. But that’s a hassle because not everyone is comfortable using the software.

Therefore, the best option is to use WordPress image Compression plugins. It’s an easy approach to image optimization that you can use on any WordPress site. From image resizing to changing image extensions, you can do it all using the plugins.

So, without further ado, let’s look at the Best Image Compression Plugins for WordPress available on the WordPress market.

How to Choose an Image Compression Plugin

In this section, you’ll go over the list of features that you should look for in an image compression plugin. Not all of them are essentials, but having them can help optimize images and make your website load faster.

Let’s take a closer look at the must-have features:

• Supports the most popular image files formats
• Converts your images to WebP
• Lets you choose the level of compression
• Optimizes images on its servers
• Resizes your images on the fly
• Has a lean interface
• Offers backup options
• Bulk optimization to compress multiple images

The Top 5 Image Compression Plugins

Here are the six WordPress image optimizer plugins I’ll test and compare in this section:

1. Imagify

With 500 000+ active installations, Imagify is a powerful image compression plugin for WordPress, allowing you to optimize your images in bulk and convert them to WebP. The visual comparison between the three compression levels (normal, ultra, and aggressive) is also very handy for choosing your optimization method and boosting your loading time.

Key features 

• Support PNG, JPG, GIF, PDF, and WebP
• Faster compression for your images (since July 2021)
• Ability to convert images to WebP format
• Three levels of compression: Normal (lossless compression), Aggressive (lossy compression), Ultra (even more aggressive lossy compression for maximum file savings)
• Resizing and optimization can be done automatically on upload or during the optimization process on existing images
• Imagify uses its own servers (not yours) to optimize your photos
• Backup and restore options are available
• Optimized Images are saved even if you deactivate the plugin

Pricing 

The free version will let you resize and compress 20 MB worth of images per month. Then, the premium pricing is the following:

• $4.99 per month for 500 GB (around 5000 images)
• $9.99 per month for unlimited usage.

Important: the free version of Imagify gives you access to all the features. The premium version allows you to optimize more images.

2. Optimole

Optimole is a smart optimization WordPress plugin as it resizes your image to fit perfectly on your visitors’ devices, including tablets and mobile. Upon activation of the plugin, your visitors will view the optimized image for their device automatically served from the Optimole Cloud Service on the fly.

Key features

• Supports all image types
• Supports WebP images
• Serves images from a global CDN for free
• Optimizes and renders the image size based on the visitor’s actual device (that’s excellent for mobiles)
• Serves lower quality images for users on slow connections
• Advanced cropping
• Lazy load script
• Convert GIF to MP4 automatically

Pricing:

The number of images you can optimize is unlimited. They care only about the number of visits you have per month (free until 5K monthly visitors). Three other plans are sold, starting at $24 per month for 25,000 unique visits each month.

If you upgrade to pro, you get a full site audit, extend the number of visits, and access priority support.

3. Compress JPEG & PNG (Tiny PNG)

This is another smart image optimization plugin that supports JPEG, PNG, and WebP images. The plugin automatically optimizes all your images by integrating with the popular image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.

Key features

• Bulk optimization of your existing media library
• Automatically resize large image uploads by setting a maximum width and/or height
• Individual optimization possible
• Support PNG and JPEG formats
• No file size limits
• Images are backed-up
• Display JPEG images more quickly with progressive JPEG encoding

Pricing: 

You can optimize roughly 100 images each month for free. Then, it’s 25$ per user per year. Going pro comes with many benefits: you can drag and drop more than 20 images at once, upgrade 5 MB to 75 MB your file size limit, and get access to the statistics using the Analyzer tool.

4. EWWW image optimizer

Almost 1M sites are using it to optimize their images without losing their quality.  You can choose to optimize individually or bulk with lossless compression.

Key features

• Intelligent conversion options to get the right image format for the job JPG, PNG, GIF, or WebP
• WebP conversion
• Unlimited files size
• Bulk optimization
• Smooth Handling with pixel-perfect optimization
• Free image backups store your original images (but be careful, that’s only for 30 days)
• Optimize images using tools on your server in the free plan (This is great for privacy matters, but for performance, this could cause your server to slow down during the bulk optimization)

Pricing

The main EWWW plugin is free and available on the WordPress repository. The premium version starts at 7$/month and goes up to 25$/month. It gives access to more features like a CDN, more bandwidth, speed audits, and the use of their API.

5. ShortPixel

ShortPixel optimizes images automatically while guarding the quality of your images. It uses minimal resources and can compress any images on your website, even the images that aren’t listed in the Media Library.

Key features

• Automatically convert PNG to JPG if that will result in smaller images
• Compatible with any gallery, slider, or eCommerce plugin
• Compress JPG (and its variations JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR), PNG, GIF images, and also PDF documents
• Option to convert any JPEG, PNG or GIF to WebP and AVIF
• Automatically scale down large images
• Bulk optimize all the existing images

Pricing

The plugin is free for around 100 images/month, but you need to buy more credits to optimize more photos.

Wrapping Up

Compressing images on your WordPress site is essential to making your photos load faster and improve your overall performance. Thankfully, you have powerful WordPress plugins like Imagify that can help you to run the optimization automatically. Imagify helped us address Google recommendations on PSI, namely, “serve images in next-gen formats” (thanks to its WebP conversion feature), “efficiently encode images”, “properly size images”, and also improved our performance metrics.

We hope this article helped you find the best image compression plugin for WordPress and tools for your small business website or blog.

Do you have any questions about the 5 Best Image Compression Plugins for a WordPress website? Let us know in the comments section below!