🖼️ Optimize images for WordPress

When it comes to optimizing your site there are a few things that should be done, in my book the first is properly optimizing the images that you upload to your site. I always stick with the mentality that I am my site(s), pages, or posts for someone that is on a 3G connection or if you want to go old school for a dial-up modem.

With the speeds of the internet that people are able to get at their home or on their phone, as well as a lot of newer designers out there I think that this has become a forgotten art. There are often times that I have clients reach out to me for site optimization and upon loading their beautiful site it is just dog slow. Digging in deeper 9/10 times their images are not optimized for the web, instead, they are trying to serve 300dpi photos and using HTML/CSS to scale the 20MB 2000 x 2000 images down to a small thumbnail.

By taking some time to properly optimize the images before you upload them to your site using such tools as JPEGmini and/or ImageOptim you can greatly reduce the file size. Before I upload images I personally try to resize them to more of an exact sized image that I am looking for also remember that you can decrease the DPI on an image as this is not magazine quality images that you need to serve as most peoples laptops/displays will render them just fine, even with Retina displays.

🖼️ Optimize images for WordPress 1
JPEGmini Pro running on macOS

Additionally, there are other services that can be used if you do not wish to do the resizing locally, one that I have become quite fond of recently is the ShortPixel plugin. It seems to do a great job of highly optimizing images, rebuilding thumbnails, and also creating WebP images that can be served as well!