One of the best ways to speed up your website is to optimize your images. Optimizing your images will offer the following benefits:
- Faster load times
- Less disk space
- Smaller backups
- Smaller website size
- Smaller database
Images will most likely take up most of your disk space in your hosting account.
One "annoying" feature of WordPress is, when you upload an image (depending on theme), it can create 8 versions of that image in different resolutions. Most people will only need to use two. The image itself and the thumbnail.
If you upload a 1MB file, WordPress will create 8 files of smaller resolutions. Those 8 files can equal the original image size or more. So now your one file you uploaded, you now have 9 files, and doubled the space used. This adds up quickly if you have hundreds or thousands of images.
With a plugin you can upload the image, optimize it, create the thumbnail only, and delete the original. You can do this automatically on the fly. You do not have to do any work at all.
Now if you uploaded a 1MB file, you will just have 2 files in total of about 120KB in size.
You can do this easily with a plugin called EWWW. This plugin can optimize your images and prevent creating multiple versions of it and delete the original uploaded image. To install and set this plugin up, do the following steps below.
- Log into Wordpress
- Search and install a plugin called EWWW
- Click on option "I know what I'm doing, leave me alone"
- Click on the button Ludicrous Mode
- Under Basic tab
- Resize Images – Set your desired size. I recommend using a resolution of 640 x 640 pixels. This can be changed if needed.
- Check off box for Lazy Load.
- Click Save Changes
- Click on Resize tab
- Under the Disable Creation column, check all the boxes. (NOTE: if you change your theme, you will need to come back here and check off the boxes again. Each theme has their own sizes).
- Click Save Changes
- Click on Convert Tab
- Check off box by Delete Originals
- Click on Save Changes
Following these steps,
- Your site will load up much faster.
- You will have just 2 images now - the main image on site, and thumbnail.
- Any uploaded images will get deleted once processed.
- You will drastically reduce your website size and the number of images on your website.
- Your backups will be much smaller and taking up much less space.
- Your site will load up faster now having optimized images.