One of the main reasons behind the increasing popularity of WordPress is its great wealth of plugins. You can do almost anything with use of plugins ranging from newsletter plugins to image slider plugins and lots more. Today, we are discussing about the most famous image optimization plugins for your WordPress-powered website or blog.
1. WP Smush.it
This useful plugin helps you to reduce image file sizes and performance the performance within WordPress. It offers an API that performs the optimizations and seamlessly integrates with WordPress. Optimizing images is done in several ways such as stripping Meta data from JPEGs, optimizing JPEF compression, converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs, and stripping the unused colors from indexed images.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 852,277
Ratings: 4.1 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.9.1
2. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer reduces file sizes for images within WordPress such as NextGEN, GRAND FLAGallery and more. It automatically optimizes your images when you upload them to your blog. It can also optimize images that you have already uploaded. You can also convert your images to the file format that will produce the smallest image size.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 301,611
Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.9.1
3. SEO Friendly Images
This powerful plugin automatically adds alt and title attributes to all the images, thus improving traffic from search engines. It updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. It also makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 1,232,828
Ratings: 4 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.8.3
4. Watermark Reloaded
This plugin allows you to watermark the uploaded images. You can also customize the watermark appearance on the settings page. You can create watermark using different fonts, colors and apply those to different image sizes. Watermark settings are simple and provide you with instant preview of how the watermark looks like on the uploaded image.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 124,949
Ratings: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.6.1
5. Imsanity
Imsanity resizes huge image uploads automatically to a size that is more reasonable for display in browser. It is configurable with a max width, height and quality. It also provides a bulk-resize features to selectively resize previously uploaded images to free up the disk space.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 98,058
Ratings: 4.9 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.9.1
6. CW Image Optimizer
CW Image Optimizer reduces the file sizes and improves performance with use of Linux image optimization programs. As it uses loseless optimization techniques, the image quality will be exactly the same before and after the optimization. Optimizing images saves your hundreds of KB per image, thus significantly less bandwidth usage.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 23,046
Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.5.2
7. BJ Lazy Load
This amazing plugin replaces all your post images, post thumbnails as well as iframes with a placeholder and loads the content as it gets close to enter the browser window. It automatically serves scaled down images in responsive designs, and serves hiDPI images for hiDPI screens.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 87,601
Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.9.1
8. Hammy
Hammy is a useful plugin that speeds up your website by generating and serving resized images for the content area. It takes your regular content images and generates a number of smaller sized images. It uses the new WP 3.5 image code.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 16,597
Ratings: 3.8 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.8.3
9. Media File Renamer
With this plugin, you can rename the media files by updating their titles. It also updates all the references to that media in the associated post if there is any. Using file renamer (in tools), you can bulk-rename all the files at once, or only the flagged files.
Cost: Free
Downloads: 23,986
Ratings: 4.1 out of 5 stars
Compatible up to: 3.8.3
The Final Words
Image optimization is an excellent way to improve traffic on your website. We hope that this extensive list of plugins will help you in selection of the right one for your WordPress blog or site. You can also check out our tips on image optimization.
Which plugin do you use for your website or blog? Do we miss out an important image optimization plugin for WordPress? Let us know in the comment section below!
Subscribe to our newsletter for similar updates right in your inbox.