Are you looking for the best WordPress image compression plugin for your website? Image compression plugins allow you to easily optimize images in WordPress for better speed and performance. In this article, we have compared the best image compression plugins for WordPress.
When Do You Need a WordPress Image Compression Plugin?
Images are larger in size than plain text which means they take longer to load and can slow down your website.
However you’ve probably heard the saying: “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Images make your content more engaging and interactive.
To improve your WordPress website speed, you need to optimize your images for the web. The best way to do this is by using Photoshop or another image editing software before you upload the image to WordPress. This gives you a lot more control on the quality of images on your website.
However, not all users are comfortable working with image editing program. For some optimizing every single image they upload sounds like a lot of work.
Luckily, there are several WordPress image compression plugins that can help you with that. These plugins optimize your images by automatically compressing them and using the smaller sized version on your website.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best WordPress image compression plugins, and how they stack up in terms of image optimization, performance, and quality.
1. reSmush.it
reSmush.it is the best WordPress image compression plugin. It allows you to automatically optimize images on upload as well as offer a bulk optimization option for older images.
It uses the reSmush API to optimize images and allows you to choose the optimization level for your uploads. The downside is that it doesn’t have different compression levels. It also limits optimization to uploads lower than 5MB in size. You can exclude individual images from compression in case you need to add an image in full size.
2. EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great option for WordPress image compression plugin. It is easy to use and can automatically optimize images you upload on the fly. It can also compress and optimize your previously uploaded images in bulk.
It performs all compression on your own servers which means you don’t need to sign up for an account to get an API key. It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside your media library folders. It doesn’t require an account to use the plugin, but you can sign up for their API to get additional features.
3. Compress JPEG & PNG images
Compress JPEG & PNG is created by the team behind TinyPNG, and you will need to create an account to use the plugin. You can only optimize 100 images each month with the free account. It can automatically compress images upon upload, and you can also bulk optimize older images.
The plugin settings allow you to choose which image sizes you want to optimize. Additionally, you can also set a maximum size for your original uploads. Images larger than that size will be automatically resized by the plugin.
4. ShortPixel Image Optimizer
ShortPixel Image Optimizer is another useful WordPress image compression plugin. It requires you to get an API key by providing your email address. The basic free account allows you to compress up to 100 images per month, and you will need to upgrade to their paid plans to increase this limit.
It starts compressing images as soon you as activate plugin and stores your original images in a separate folder. It also allows you to compare the original file with the compressed version to see the quality difference. ShortPixel is packed with advanced features and gives you the ability to choose comparison formats.
5. WP Smush
WP Smush is another popular WordPress image compression plugin. It automatically compresses images on upload and can also be used to compress and optimize your older image files. You can also set maximum image resolution, and your images will scale down to more reasonable sizes while being compressed.
The free version of plugin doesn’t require you to create an account to use their API key. The bulk optimization feature allows you to optimize up to 50 images at a time, and you can rerun the bulk optimizer to compress more images.
The free version of the plugin doesn’t perform that well. See our review of WP Smush with pros and cons.
Comparison Test Scores for Image Compression Plugins
Now that you know about the different WordPress image compression options, let’s take a look at how they compare against each other in terms of performance.
To measure this, we ran test by uploading the same image using each of these plugins.
Testing JPEG Image Compression
We used the following JPEG image for our tests, it is 118 KB in file size.
We didn’t touch any of the plugin settings and tested the compression with out of the box settings. Here are our test results:
| Plugin | Compressed Size | Saved (%) | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| reSmush.it | 76 KB | 30.59% | Lossless |
| EWWW Image Optimizer | 112 KB | 5% | Lossless |
| Compress JPEG & PNG images | 114.7 KB | 2.8 % | Lossy |
| ShortPixel Image Optimizer | 69.2 KB | 41.94% | Lossy |
| WP Smush | 112 KB | 5% | Lossless |
Testing PNG Image Compression
Next we wanted to test a PNG image to see how our contenders optimize it.
We used the following PNG image for the test, and it is 102 KB in file size.
Here are our test results:
| Plugin | Compressed Size | Saved (%) | Method |
|---|---|---|---|
| reSmush.it | 36 KB | 63.8% | Lossless |
| EWWW Image Optimizer | 97.5 KB | 1.9% | Lossless |
| Compress JPEG & PNG images | 34.3 | 64% | Lossy |
| ShortPixel Image Optimizer | 37 KB | 63.5% | Lossy |
| WP Smush | 99 KB | 2.9% | Lossless |
Which is The Best Image Compression Plugin for WordPress?
If you are not looking for flexible options in your image compression plugin, then reSmush.it gives you the best results in terms of performance by making the real difference in image file size.
If you are willing to pay for image compression, then you can try ShortPixel which performed really well in our tests.
EWWW Image Optimizer is a great plugin with flexible settings, but you will need their paid API key to get access to compression levels which make the real difference.
We hope you found this comparison of best WordPress image compression plugins useful. You may also want to see our list of common image issues in WordPress and how to fix them.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The short pixel image optimizer is fantastic. Thanks.
Glad you liked the recommendation
Great article to date compared to other content out there. I think my best is shortpixel.
Do you still think it is among the top five this month?
We still recommend these plugins
I sell prints on Storefront. They all have white backgrounds. An image (eg a car) takes less than half the page space and is surrounded by white. The white surround (requiring zero resolution) adds to size but shows depth and space for mounting and framing. If I crop the white space a buyer will not see the print in context. How can one manage this conflict between large areas of “dead” space that serve a purpose and the reduction of image sizes for uploading to WordPress?
The image compression plugins should not remove the white space that you say is required, they would only reduce the size of the data that makes up the images.
reSmushit hasn’t been updated in 10 months and its support forum is filled with unresolved tickets saying it doesn’t work any more. Looks abandoned unfortunately.
Thank you for reaching out, it appears the plugin was recently updated and they are replying to tickets. The plugin does not appear to be abandoned.
Thanks so much for this article – it’s really helpful! I’m going to install reSmush.it now thanks to your recommendation.
You’re welcome, glad our recommendation could be helpful
Hi,
Thanks for the info, it was very useful.
I needed compression because my blog had ground to a halt, and support told me mo optimise ‘image and js files’.
Do you have a suggestion for the latter too?
Thanks for your help,
Owen
You would likely need to reach out to the support for the plugin that has the JS file that is giving you trouble but for some tips, you may want to take a look at our article here: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wordpress-performance-speed/
Thanks for replying.
I absolutely no idea which js file is causing problems, or even whether any are at all.
That is beyond my current ability
Regards,
Owen
You would want to take a look at the article in our previous reply and that should help with the process
If I were to try a few of the different free plugins will each re-optimize the images? This is for a photo website, images already optimized using Photoshop “Save for Web” feature. I use the NextGen Pro plugin. When I run a test on GTMetrix I keep seeing a note to optimize my images. I’ve tried EWWW Image Optimizer, Smush and Imagify.
My concern is that trying these different plugins keeps optimizing the images over and over. Do each of the plugins store their own version of the optimized original?
Thanks for the article and any comment!
It would depend on the plugin for how they handle the original but you are correct. If you are using an image optimization plugin, you would only want to use one to prevent multiple types of compression on an image.
Thanks for sharing list of cool compression plugins. I downloaded smush.it
Glad our list was helpful
I would be interresting to see the WordPress default compression results in your comparison list. At my knowledge, WordPress use jpeg compression at 80% or something, but does not recompress the various thumbnails sizes so it slows down the admin dashboard a bit. For best visual results, I already tried Photoshop manual compression and disabled the WordPress compression. Because even if you work hard to display the perfect image with Photoshop, WordPress will recompress it in the upload process.
I don’t understand how these percentages can be meaningful without evaluating the quality of the resulting product. I can reduce images by 20-80% in Photoshop by changing the JPEG quality, but at some point they degrade and below that they look awful. Did you compare the quality of the results, looking for artifacts, color changes, perceived sharpness?
Thanks,
Donna
Hi Donna,
All these plugins attempt to compress images without quality loss. They keep their settings lower to ensure minimal quality loss. However, when you do the same thing in Photoshop you can compress more to the point where quality is acceptable to you.
I prefer Imsanity.
Not only can you set the images to various levels of compression, but it will also resize huge images to more manageable sizes for web.
I’d like to point out that the PNG compression by ReSmush.it is NOT lossless. I checked their API and while JPGs can be lossless, PNG compression is NOT. Article needs to be updated to reflect that.
In addition, ReSmush.it’s interface is vague in compression options because the only thing you can set is image quality value, which is default at 92. There’s no way to tell if that means lossless compression or not. I checked their site again and they indicate anything below 90 will result in loss of value, so I’m ASSUMING then that an image quality value of 90+ will be lossless.
BUT because they didn’t explain it clearly and because there’s no option to use lossless PNG compression, I’ve had to look for another plugin solution.
reSmush.it use my hosting CPU to compress the image???
hi ! after reading this article, i downloaded the resmush.it plugin on my few site, and activate it, and compressed all my images. according to it’s dashboard worked perfect and save more than 50% but when i checked the size of my images on my site they are still same, and mysql database also.
sorry for my bad english, i hope you will understand.
bye take care
Hi Prince,
Please try other plugins mentioned in the list.
hi !
thanks for your reply. yes i will try other plugins
bye tk cr
hi ! please help . i deleted the resmush.it plugin from stayfitpros.com site. Now images are not showing on desktop . images are present but not showing. if you click any product and go to their main page images are not displaying.
Hi Prince,
You can reinstall the plugin. You can also ask plugin author for support.
hi !
i contacted with my theme developer , he told me to deactivate all the cache plugins. I deactivated cache plugin and also wp loader option from speed tab of cloudflare now problem is solved.
bye tk cr
such a great article
Great article, thank you. I’ve got WP Smush, but after that, I’m going to try reSmush.it
I hope it be better.
Best regards
ANDRZEJ, I’m not sure if you’re using the free or premium one here. If using the pro you would see savings of around 47.4% on the first image and on the full image it’s 55.5%.
http://take.ms/IVUBa
On the second image, it’s 78.6% for the full one and overall with thumbs it’s 72.3%.
http://take.ms/WpgS0
One last thing to mention is that we’re close to releasing a new version that will offer further improvements to your image optimisation percentages and get your site loading even quicker.
Just wanted to throw this out.
Thank you Tim. I’m using free version… for now. But I’m thinking about premium
Thanks for comparision
Great comparison, thank you. I was hoping to see Imagify in the lineup and am curious how it would stack up against the others.
Hi,
I use Imagify (from WP Rocket team)
Very easy to use you can optimize JPGs, PNGs & GIFs in 3 compression levels
Isn’t Free but purpose interressing One time plans.