Optimise Your WordPress Images Without A Plugin

You want to optimise the images on your WordPress website for multiple reasons. It makes your WordPress website load faster and improves your user experience using your website, resulting in better SEO rankings for your website.

To optimise your WordPress images without a plugin, go to Tinypng.com and upload your image. When the image is compressed, you can see how much Tinypng has compressed the image. You can then download and upload the compressed image to your WordPress website in the media library.

There are more tools than just TinyPNG if you don’t want to use a WordPress plugin. I’m listing 4 other websites you can use to compress images. I recommend you use websites for this, as downloading an application just for image compression is too excessive.

But before I get to that, I’ll explain some of the benefits of optimising and compressing images for your WordPress website.

Why Should I Optimise Images Without A Plugin?

When we’re browsing, we want to spend as little time as possible waiting for a website to load. This is both for our own website and for other websites we’re browsing as well, and here images play a significant role.

This all comes down to user experience, both when Google measure it and also for your visitors. The better compressed and optimised your images are, the faster your website will load which will result in a better user experience and higher rankings on Google in the long run.

The smaller the image size is, the faster it will naturally load as the browser needs to process less KB. This is why you want to optimise your images, but there are many formats to consider.

You probably know formats like JPG and PNG. But there are 2 other formats suited better for the Web.

The first image format is called WebP. It was a format developed by Google to try and create a format that would provide superior lossless image quality for the web. It’s funny because this format was developed all the way back in 2010. But it was not until the recent year that this format has really been added to tools in general.

Webflow, which is an alternative to WordPress, didn’t add WebP format until the end of 2022, so tools and companies are still implementing this.

There is another format, which is even better, more compressed and better quality images. It’s AVIF.

AVIF was created in 2019 and was designed to be a better format than any current format. It was built to be better compressed and better optimised for the web, all while maintaining a better image quality than even WebP.

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5 Best Free Online Image Optimisation Tools

Themeisle conducted an excellent test of which tool compresses images best and most in terms of size reduction.

In this article, based on their testing, they found out that Compress Now is the best compression tool for PNGs and JPGs. They tested both a PNG and a JPG file.

But each of these tools has its advantages, so let’s dive into each and one of them.

TinyPNG

TinyPNG is one of the most used websites for composing images. And even though the website looks a bit outdated, then fear not. The technology behind it is still state of the art and allows you to compress your images up to 70%.

It’s super easy to use, and it’s free. You just upload the image you wish to compress, and then TinyPNG takes care of the rest. When it’s done, then you can see how much the image was optimised and compressed, and then you can download it and upload it to your WordPress website.

You can upload multiple images at once, up to 5MB per image, and TinyPNG supports the formats WebP, PNG and JPG.

Try TinyPNG

Optimizilla

Optimizilla has a more modern design compared to TinyPNG but essentially works the same way with an extra feature.

Once you’ve uploaded images, you can choose what degree you want to compress your images to. This scale goes from 10 to 100, 10 being the worst and 100 being the best. I can’t imagine a case where you would use a scale of 10, but it’s there if you have a use case for it.

I found with a scale of 10, I could reach almost 90% compression, and on a scale of 100, it was 0%. I’ll recommend somewhere between 80 and 90 on the scale, and then you don’t lose too much of the image quality but still optimise and compress the image.

You can upload multiple images at once, and Optimizilla supports the formats GIF, PNG and JPG.

Try Optimizilla

Compress now

Again we have an outdated website such as TinyPNG, but the technology still works perfectly. It works just like the other tools where you choose the images you want to compress, press upload and then you can choose the compression level.

The higher the level, the more your images will be compressed, and you need to move it above 20% to get any sort of compression of your image.

You can upload multiple images at once, up to 9MB per image, and Compress now supports the formats GIF, PNG and JPG.

Try Compress now

ImageRecycle

ImageRecyle has a modern design and works a lot like TinyPNG. You can’t control the compression level, only upload your image and let ImageRecycle optimise and compress it.

You can also upload PDF files, but I’m missing a preview of the images I uploaded to compare before and after to see how the compression went.

You can upload multiple images at once, and ImageRecycle supports the formats PDF, GIF, PNG and JPG.

Try ImageRecycle

JPEG.io

Don’t let yourself get tricked by the name; JPEG.io can optimise and compress more images than just JPEG. In fact, JPEG.io is the tool that supports most formats, 9 formats to be precise.

It works just like any other tool, you choose the images you wish to upload, but now you can choose from your computer, Dropbox, Google Drive or Box. JPEG.io has made a direct integration into these tools as well.

The compression works just like TinyPNG and ImageRecycle, where you don’t manage the compression settings, you just let JPEG.io do the compression, and then you can download the image in the end.

Again here I’m missing a preview of the before and after of the image. It really helps to see how the compression went.

JPEG.io is powered by Kraken, which is an image compression engine.

You can upload multiple images at once, and JPEG.io supports the formats JPG, PNG, GIF, SVG, BMP, EPS, PSD, TIFF and WEBP.

Try JPEG.io

Conclusion

With these 5 image optimisation tools, you should now have a tool which suits your need to optimise your images for your WordPress website.

Even though I’ll recommend you use a plugin to ease the process for you, then these tools can easily replace the functionality of an image optimisation plugin. Find the tool that you like to use, and then just remember to optimise all your images.

If you want to avoid having to download, re-upload and change the image in your posts and pages in WordPress to the newly uploaded and optimised image, then I can recommend the plugin Enable Media Replace. It’ll make your life a lot easier.

Now, after you have optimised your images, the next natural step is to optimise them for SEO. For this, I have written 5 SEO tips for that in my article about choosing the perfect size for your featured image.

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