Is Imagify the best compressor plugin for websites?

What is the best compressor plugin to use for your website? Why would you even want to use a compressor?

Displaying a web page on a browser requires receiving many more files than just the web page. Typically each web page requires loading CSS files, Javascript libraries, font files and images. Compressing these files, especially images, will speed up your website.

Most of the data needed to load a page will be image data.

Not optimizing your images can have a severe impact on the speed of your website. This will impact your ranking positions as Google will penalize your website for loading slowly.

Even if Google doesn’t penalize your website, slow websites are bad for your readers. People don’t have a lot of patience and will not wait around for your page to load.

That’s why you must work on optimizing your images to load quickly. I’ll review the issues with images, various solutions and how the Imagify service helps optimize your images, saving you time and boosting the speed of your website.

Table of Contents

Are images loading slowly?

Your web page should load in just a few seconds, ideally 2 seconds or less. If you are using large, uncompressed images you are likely to have a slow loading website.

Unfortunately web pages keep getting bigger over time. The image data is the biggest contributor to the size of the typical web page:

Slow loading images are a common problem on websites and can seriously harm your search engine rankings. Images sizes vary depending on a range of factors such as:

• file format (JPEG, PNG, GIF and other formats)
• dimensions (width x height)
• compression level

Also non-image factors can affect the load times such as:

• hosting service
• speed/bandwidth of web server
• using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

As you can see, there are many factors that will affect the size of your images and how quickly they load.

Even if your website loads quickly for you, it may be slow for other visitors from different regions or countries. For websites addressing a global audience you should consider using a CDN to increase your website in other countries.

Automate image optimization using a plugin or free website service

Faster image loading

How can you speed up image loading on your website?

They are several techniques you can use:

• use the correct image format
• properly size your image
• compress your images
• offload serving images to a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
• faster web server (upgrade your hosting plan)
• use a lazy loading plugin (only load an image when it scrolls into view)

Image formats

Different formats should be used for different images. JPEG is great for photos while PNG is better for illustrations or drawings. GIF are used for animated images.

Newer formats such as WEBP give even greater compression without losing quality.

Properly size your images

The average smartphone has a horizontal display of 400-500 px, any images with a greater width will either cause horizontal scrolling or will be resized by the browser resulting in wasted bandwidth.

Automatically resizing your images can reduce download time and speed up page loading.

Compress your images

Compressing images doesn’t change the width and height of the image but reduces the file size. Different compression methods can be used including lossless methods that don’t reduce the quality of the image.

CDN

You can offload serving images to a dedicated network of servers (CDN). Some hosting services make this easy to do (such as SiteGround).

Once you have set up a CDN your website images (and CSS and Javascript files) will be delivered from the nearest server to the visitor’s location automatically.

Siteground provides a basic CDN for free and a Premium CDN service that caches and serves web pages directly from the CDN. I explain more about the SiteGround CDN service here: https://www.learntorankyoursite.com/secrets-for-using-siteground-as-your-global-hosting-provider/#aioseo-siteground-cdn

Faster web server

The speed of your web server will depend on your hosting plan you selected from your hosting provider. You will usually be able to upgrade your plan to boost the speed of your website.

Before upgrading your hosting plan I suggest quicker (and cheaper) fixes first:

• Pick a fast WordPress theme
• Use any caching services provided by your hosting provider
• Use image compression

If you still have a slow website you can then consider upgrading your hosting plan.

Lazy loading plugin

Install a lazy loading plugin for your website. These plugins will alter the page to only load the image once it scrolls into view. They reduces the page loading time for visitors.

Image optimization plugin will handle compressing, resizing and image format conversion for you

How to reduce image size without losing quality

Imagify optimizer offers two options for compressing images. You can select how you want imagify to handle your images.

Imagify Compression Options

For pro users you can set Imagify to auto convert PNG files to JPEG files (this will result in a smaller file size).

Batch compress images to save time

You may have a large number of images on your website already. Optimizing each image, one by one, will take a long time. Imagify can batch process images, just select and drop the images onto the drop zone on the Imagify website to have them compressed automatically.

Speed up your website with optimized images

From the Imagify website you can create a free account. Then just drop images onto the website page in the drop zone to have them compressed.

Your dropped images will be compressed and available to download from a zip file. Drop as many as you like then download the zip file.

Your free account allows you to optimize 20MB of images per month.

Paid plans are available if you need to optimize more than 20MB per month.

Imagify plugin

In addition to the website service which can be used by anyone Imagify offers a plugin for WordPress users.

Save time by quickly optimizing images from within WordPress rather than using an external site.

Benefits of using the Imagify WordPress plugin:

• Optimize all your images in one click [rewrite]
• Resize your images [rewrite]
• Restore your original media when needed
• Images automatically optimized according to your selected compression level

With the Imagify plugin you can see your compressed images, change the compression level or restore the original image.

You can also see your Imagify account settings and quota available and check your account status.

Imagify Pricing

All plans start with the free plan, no credit card required. Then upgrade to a paid plan if needed.

The current prices (March 2023) are:

Final Thoughts

Manually optimizing images is time consuming and the reality is you probably are not going to do it.

You want an automatic solution that, after installing and configuring, will automatically resize and compress your images on the fly. Imagify is fast, easy to use and free (for the first 20MB of data per month).

If you don’t already have a image compression/optimization plugin you can’t go wrong with Imagify. You don’t need to use WordPress, the Imagify website allows you to drag and drop files to compress them.

For lightweight blogging the free version is all you need. If you have more demanding needs and require heavier compression the paid plan is less than $5 per month for upto 5000 images.

Check it out here:

If you liked this article please share with your network. You can use the social media sharing buttons below. Thanks!