How to compress images and photos in WordPress (Automatically)

How to compress images and photos in WordPress (Automatically)

- I'll be teaching you how you can compress images and photos on your WordPress website to make sure your blog load faster.  Hey, guys, welcome to another video episode of ShoutMeLoud, where I teach you about WordPress, SEO and Blogging, that actually helps you to make money, and live a boss-free life. Well, today video is for all the WordPress blogger who are blogging, who have a WordPress website, or who are also offering WordPress services to their clients. Now, one thing which we know is that it's very important for us to make sure that our blog or website, loads really fast.

Now, in the past I've done one or two videos where you can actually learn the techniques that will help you to reduce your WordPress blog load time.

Now, today video is for people who are using images on their website. I'll be teaching you how you can compress images and photos on your WordPress website to make sure your blog load faster.

And here is actually a result from Pingdom, and you can see that from Shoutmeloud, we are using only 232 KB worth of images on the homepage. And our actually blog loads in less than one second. So, basically, I know what I am talking about, and if you are somebody who's actually first time coming to ShoutMeLoud, you should know that we are online from last 10 years, and we have been helping numerous individuals just like you to grow in your career.

Now, getting back to the topic. So here is one website which is from a photographer and you can see that the size of the total images used on the website is about 8 MB, and images constitute about 95% of the website. Now, that's actually a lot of content size here and you can see here the load time is not much, thanks to the good hosting the person is using, and a good optimization technique like Cloudflare. But still, the page size is 7.7 MB, and especially if somebody is browsing the website on a 3G or 2G connection in that case, they will find it really hard to see the website loading.

So the best way any photographer or even a blogger can do is they can compress their images, and for that, we can actually use a plugin.

And the plugin that I am talking about is called ShortPixel. This is what I use on ShoutMeLoud, and in a moment, I would show you how to use this plugin. Let me tell you what I like about this plugin. Number one, if you are a hobby blogger and you don't blog much, you can actually take advantage of their free plan, which allows you to compress 100 images in a month, which is actually a decent number for anybody who's doing hobby blogging.

Second, using this plugin, you can actually compress all your past images automatically or if you want to compress images manually, you can also do that.

I would show you that as well in a quick second. This plugin has been online for quite a long time. Other few factor is when you compress an image, it also creates a backup of the image in a separate folder. So if in future you want to like reuse the original image, you can do that.

If you're a photographer where you don't want to compress the images by losing quality, you can actually take advantage of their feature where it compresses images without making it lose quality.

So depending on the way you're using WordPress, you can pick from three different option. And let me show you the three different options. So one is lossy, one is glossy, and another one is lossless. Now this one is highly recommended for all the people who are using technical drawing or images from vector graphics.

Glossy graphics are useful for the website, like for the photographers, if you have a photographic website, or you have a travel blog where you're uploading pictures from your recent trip.

Well, glossy option is much better for you. And for anybody who would just want to compress images, and images does not have to be complete identical, you can use lossy images. It compresses the maximum. You can actually click on this link and you can upload it, your image, and see what it means to be using lossy, glossy, or lossless images.

Usually, I would recommend for a typical blog, lossy is okay.

For anybody who is into photography, glossy is great. For anybody who is into technical drawing or using vector graphics, they should use lossless. Okay so these are the few settings that you can use. Now once you download and install the plugin, you actually need to go and register on shortpixel.com. And from the admin area, you will find your API key.

Now you need to enter that API key over here and validate your key. That will activate your plugin, and you can actually start using the plugin for free for the first 100 images, and if you want to compress more images, you can buy one of their license, which is actually not much. So depending on your requirement, you can buy this licenses.

Now let's say if you buy short plan, which gives you 5,000 images per month, and if you don't use those all images, you can actually cancel your subscription, and you can carry forward this limit for the next month for the future. So that is another great feature of ShortPixel plugin. Now here, there are a few options that you can use, like you can enable the image backup feature. It will create a backup of the original image in one of the folder in your WordPress directory. That really helps, especially if you are working on a client website and if your client says in future that, "Hey, I want my backup," the EXIF tag is the information about the photo, that where the photo is taken, which camera is used, and all those metadata, which in most of the scenario, you will not be using it, so you can actually remove the EXIF tag of the image, which is also recommended.

 

If you like to resize images while uploading, you can use this feature. I usually don't do that because I resize the image before uploading. Now there are some advanced feature. Usually, I just use the Optimize PDF feature, and it's a good idea that you should go through all the feature and see which one fits perfectly for your project. Now here's some statistic, which is pretty mind-blowing, that on an average, almost half of the size of my images have been reduced, which is actually a lot of saving.

Now that means the disk saving is about 500 MB. The bandwidth, now this is a very interesting factor, is I've saved about 4.38 terabyte of bandwidth just by compressing these images.

And this is very useful, especially if you are using managed WordPress hosting or a hosting where you have limited bandwidth. And you can see, I still have 41,994 credit which is left.

I've consumed only 8,006. And you can see that my original images are stored in a backup folder, which is of 1.31 GB right now. So I would actually like to empty this. Because it's been awhile, I really don't need those, original images anymore.

So let's quickly do that. Now while that's happening, so there are multiple ways you can use this plugin. Let me just show you. So Number 1, you can go to the Media Library, and if you want, you can actually compress any images that you have uploaded. You can actually bulk smush if you like, or you can just simply click on Optimize Now.

Let's do that. And image will be compressed. Now in my case, I usually compress my images before uploading.

I use this free tool on Mac, called ImageOptim. But if you're not on Mac or if you're not using any external tool, well, you can actually use this feature.

So in this case, you might not see a lot of compression because it's already compressed, but let's see what this plugin can do. Go up, it's actually reduced by 63%, which is actually a lot. Let's do this, let's just pick this to three. And let's make them glossy optimization, see what it does. Okay, so it's taking it's own time.

I'm actually going to leave a link for the image optimizer. It's a free tool that you can download if you're on Mac. And you can just simply add an image and compress it.

It's really fast and something that will help your workflow a lot. Okay, so now in General option, there's an option called Save and go to Bulk Process.

This is where you can actually go ahead and start compressing all your past images if you would like. So here, you can see it shows you the number of images that it will compress.

Some have errors. And I can include thumbnails if I like, but I will not use that because I have less credits, and it's okay not to compress thumbnail in some of the scenario. And that's it.

If you want to restore your compressed images, this is the option that you can use. And then you can click on Restart Optimizing to start compressing images. Okay, well let's see what happens here. Okay, nothing happened. Let's click on Optimize Now.

All right, it's actually started bulk optimization so that you would understand how images and photos are compressed.

And you can see the process has started. Now we can start compressing one image at a time, and the best part, even if you're on a shared hosting or on hosting which is not powered enough, this plugin does not put a lot of load on your server. So you can see started optimizing, now this image has been optimized by 63%. It will take another image, and this process will keep going on.

However, just you need to know that if you actually close this tab, the bulk processing will pause. So you can actually open everything in a new tab and keep this open while the compression happens at the back end. Well, this is what it is. Now I'm going to stop this processing. Because for me, the image's quality is really, really important, the kind of blog we have.

But I hope this video helped you to understand how to compress images and photos on your WordPress website. If you have any question, feel free to ask me in the comment section below. I will leave all the links in the description so that you can quickly go and read about ShortPixel plugin. You can claim there, 100 free images a month, and few other links which will help you to improve the loading time of your WordPress website.

Now if you enjoyed this video, it added value, do like and do subscribe to our channel.

It definitely helps. I'm your host, Harsh Agrawal. See you in the next video, bye bye..

https://baez5058--mommakingmoneyathome.thrivecart.com/5-digital-planners-wcommercial-rights/

Thanks for your visit!

https://youtu.be/r4n6wjnarIY

https://bit.ly/3QgWiQK