As much as images can help attract visitors to your website or blog, images can also help slow down your website's loading speed. And you don't want that. Visitors wants your websites to load fast and adding two to three seconds of waiting may mean lost customers or leads. If you are running a WordPress website, you will need your images to be optimized for faster load speed. It can be done it two ways. The first option is to use an image optimizing plugin. There are various free WordPress Image Optimizing Plugins in the WordPress repository and here are some:

Image Optimizing WordPress Plugins • WP Smush • EWWW Image Optimizer • CW Image Optimizer • ImSanity • Lazy Load*

PROS • With plugins optimizing images are automated.

• Since the process is automated, it saves you time.

CONS • Too much plugins may cause your page speed to slow down.

• Most free plugins are not updated regularly and may be incompatible with some themes.

meticulously scans every image you upload – or have WP Smush already added to your site – cuts all the unnecessary data and scales it for you before adding it to your media library. This is a free plugin from WPMU Dev.

is a WordPress plugin that will The EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. It can optimize the images that you have already uploaded, convert your images automatically to the file format that will produce the smallest image size (make sure you read the WARNINGS), and optionally apply lossy compression to achieve huge savings for PNG and JPG images. The is a WordPress plugin that will CW Image Optimizer automatically and losslessly optimize your images as you upload them to your blog. It can also optimize the images that you have already uploaded in the past. Because CW Image Optimizer uses lossless optimization techniques, your image quality will be exactly the same before and after the optimization. The only thing that will change is your file size.

images to improve page load times. Uses jQuery.sonar Lazy load to only load an image when it's visible in the viewport. Lazy Load delays loading of images in long web pages. Images outside of viewport are not loaded until user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading. Using Lazy Load on long web pages will make the page load faster.

The second option is to use image optimizing software and optimize your images before uploading to your website.

Image Optimizing Software

• ImageOptim • Kraken.io • Tutorials Point Image

Optimizer • TinyJPG • TinyPNG • CompresssPNG

• ResizeImage.net • Optimizilla • Compressor.io • Jpeg Optimizer • Riot

PROS • Optimization is done externally from your website, thus it doesn't use up too much memory

from your server.

• It does not slow down your page loading time.

CONS • The process is done manually does taking extra time and effort.

is a free online image optimizing app that offers both Kraken.io the web interface and WordPress plugin for optimizing images. The free plugin allows you to optimize images up to 100MB. While the web interface offers free image optimization for images less than 1MB in file size.

is a free and open source software for Mac that can ImageOptimoptimize your images. The website also has a web interface that is not free and costs $9 per month for 1,000 images.

is a free image optimizing tool Tutorials Point Image Optimizer from Tutorials Point website. It can optimize both PNG and JPEG images.

reduces the file sizes of JPEG files. Every uploaded image TinyJPGis analyzed to apply the best possible JPEG encoding. Based on the content of your image an optimal strategy is chosen. The result is a quality image without wasting storage or bandwidth!

reduces the file sizes of PNG files. This free web TinyPNGinterface is also from the same makers of TinyJPEG.

is a web software interface that reduces the file Compress PNG size of PNG images. All data are deleted after an hour so you have to download it once compressed.

is another free web interface that reduces the ResizeImage.Net file size of you images. You can upload JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF images. It allows you to reduce your file size according to custom width and height, your own custom Fixed Aspect Ratio, of by percentage. You can also rotate the images before reducing its file size.

is an online image optimizer that uses a smart Optimizillacombination of the best optimization and lossy compression algorithms to shrink JPEG and PNG images to the minimum possible size while keeping the required level of quality. It also allows you to upload images in batch of 20s.

is a powerful online tool for reducing drastically the Compressor.io

size of your images and photos whilst maintaining a high quality with almost no difference before and after compression. It can optimize 4 types of image formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG. You can also choose between lossless or lossy type of compression.

is another free online image optimizing tool that JPEG Optimizer is specific for JPEG files. It allows you to use either percentage or custom width to compress your images.

is a free image optimizing software for Windows. It has an Rioteasy to use interface to compare the original with the optimized image in real time and instantly see the resulting file size. The image optimizer is lightweight, fast and simple to use, yet powerful for advanced users.