When ever we talk about a useful post, it’s always incomplete without a beautiful and relevant image. Images also help in better optimization of your post but at the same time they increase the loading time. Specially, when we all know that search engines like faster loading blog, using too many images might not be a great idea. But how about those posts which are incomplete without screenshots? More over, I follow atleast one image/post to add another level of beauty in the presentation of my post.
A quick solution to add those heavy images on your blog post without compromising load time of your page is optimize images for size before adding it. Doing it manually is a headache, as you have to process every single image and if you are using bulk image compression software’s like JPEG Advance compressor and so on. But again, this will be time consuming and it’s always a good idea to work smartly more than working hard.
Smush.it is an online service from Yahoo which helps you to compress your image without degrading the size. There is also a WordPress plugin call Smush.it which does the same thing and once you install and activate this plugin, when ever you upload an image, it will be compressed automatically. This will not effect the quality of your image and most important you don’t have to miss out on any image because of it’s loading time.
When smush.it was launched, only available option was to smush (Compress) the images which are uploaded after activation of the plugin, but latest version added a new feature call Bulk smush.it. This feature, compresses all old images on your server and this is very helpful in reducing your load time for old posts by compressing images. In case, if you have a huge blog or blog with tons of images, you might like to put your blog in maintainance mode and compress all old images.
Some of the features of Smush.it
- stripping meta data from JPEGs
- optimizing JPEG compression
- converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
- stripping the un-used colors from indexed images
It’s always a better idea to lower down the image load size this will decrease the blog loading time. You can check your page load time using Pingdom and iwebtoool.
Here is a screenshot of my image gallery on WordPress and it clearly shows how much of bytes this plugin saved from each of my images:
Even if you are using any CDN or serve images from sub-domain, you should use this plugin as it compresses and reduce the size of images at the time of uploading, so even with CDN, Smush.it will make your blog loading faster.
I have already added smush.it in the list of plugins which we use on ShoutMeLoud and it’s one of those essential plugins that you can’t miss. Though, this plugin doesn’t do anything apart from compressing images on your WordPress blog, but since speed is one of important factor in search engine ranking, we can’t afford to miss this.
Do let us know how do you optimize images on your blog? Do you use Smush.it WordPress plugin or any other similar plugin or software?
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Article by Harsh Agrawal
Harsh has written 1211 articles.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
iwebtool limit the request for pay. That’s not possible instead for googing with “web tools” such as domain-pop.com – like that
.-= 1800 SaiGon ´s last blog ..5 free tools that watermark images =-.
Harsh I think it can be reduced the size of images.It can decrease loading time of images on blog.
.-= Surender Sharma ´s last blog ..Make Money On Technogati.com =-.
I use Smush It plugin on my blog. Like it.
.-= steppinout ´s last blog ..Get Free Windows 7 Ultimate Signature Edition with Party Pack By Hosting Win7 Launch Party =-.
smush it is a great wordpress plugin to reduce image size and increase page load time
.-= osama ´s last blog ..Find and remove Duplicate Files via BitFinder =-.
smush it is great! It can process GIF, JPG and PNG images that are up to one megabyte in size. If you Smush.it WordPress plug-in installed, any new image you add to the post will automatically optimized behind the scenes.
.-= Online shop hosting ´s last blog ..F.A.Q =-.
There is also a firefox addon for it i think. Do include that too here, Harsh.
Good Luck
.-= Amal Roy ´s last blog ..Find Invisible Users in GTalk – The Simplest Way =-.
I guess this plugin will use increase cpu usage of blog and not good for shared hosted wordpress blog, right?
@Otobong
Not really… I used it on Shared hosting, and on VPS…and don’t see any different. A good shared hosting, will not even let you feel, that you added a new plugin.