How To Optimize Your WordPress Images With ShortPixel Plugin

This week we’ve been covering how to improve the performance and speed of your WordPress website.

Once you have ensured the basics are taken care of, it’s important to make sure images used throughout your website have been optimized to load fast. 

If you’re using photos taken from an iPhone or a digital camera, it’s likely they haven’t been optimized and could be using up your disk space while providing your visitors with a bad browsing experience.

Automatically Optimize Images

The ShortPixel plugin allows you to download, install and then automatically runs inside your media directory to compress and optimize your images.

Once installed, you’ll notice the general settings to optimize your images:

These default settings should be plenty to help you get your images optimized.  If you have a lot of large images that you haven’t re-sized in another program such as Photoshop, I would recommend allowing the plugin to reduce these.

The majority of very slow loading WordPress websites we see in our helpdesk stem from unmodified large images.

ShortPixel also has an advanced section where it will optimize images outside of the default media directory:

How To Optimize Your WordPress Images Tutorial

I also filmed a tutorial to show me using he ShortPixel plugin on the Name Hero blog:

As stated in my video, the only downside to ShortPixel is you have to pay if you plan on using more than 100 images per month.

However, if you use it from the beginning of your blog, you’ll be all set.  If you wait like me, then you’ll initially have to pay to get your blog optimized.

Since running the plugin, I’ve noticed a jump in speed and I also expect some of my search engine rankings to increase.

Feel free to let me know below if you have any questions using this plugin!