Images play a significant role in web design, making it more engaging and visually appealing. However, the large image files slow downloading speed and affect user experience. This is where image optimization tools come in handy, and WP Smush is a popular choice among WordPress users. But it’s not the only one; there are several other worthy alternatives available that are just as good or even better. In this blog post, we explore some of the best WP Smush alternatives that you can use to optimize your website’s images and enhance your users’ experience.
What is the WP Smush plugin?
WP Smush is one of the most prevalent WordPress image optimizer plugins for your website. This plugin is specially designed to help you optimize and compress plenty of images on your WordPress website effectively. The plugin uses advanced image compression techniques to optimize images automatically. When you upload an image to your WordPress media library, the plugin will automatically process the image by removing unnecessary data while preserving visual quality. It applies techniques like lossless compression, stripping metadata, and optimizing the image format to reduce file sizes.
In addition to its automatic optimization features, WP Smush also provides bulk optimization options. This feature assists you to optimize multiple images at once, which is extremely useful if you have a large media library.
However, WP Smush relies on external servers to process the image optimization. While this approach offloads the resource-intensive task from your own server, it means that the plugin’s performance is tied to the availability and speed of those external servers. In addition, this plugin lacks plenty of advanced features such as specific compression algorithms, WebP support, more granular control over optimization settings, etc. Hence, some users want to seek WP Smush alternatives to extend these functionalities. In today’s we will bring you a list of 6 high-quality Wp Smush alternatives. Let’s give them a look.
What is the necessity of using WordPress Image Optimization Plugins?
By using the WordPress Image Optimization plugin, you can improve your website performance by reducing image file sizes so that you can get faster page load times and a better user experience. Moreover, when your images are optimized, which will consume less sandwich and storage space on your server. As a result, you can effectively use your hosting resources.
Further, using these plugins to optimize images also has many SEO benefits, especially helping you get better rankings on search engines. What’s more, they help optimize your website for mobile devices to ensure fast and efficient loading on smaller screens.
EWWW Image Optimizer is another significant WP Smush plugin. One standout feature that makes this plugin exceptional is its unlimited file size limit; this means that the plugin can handle uncompressed images with ease. It has an automated optimization feature that makes it very easy for users as they do not have to compress images manually.
Moreover, this plugin helps you reduce the size of uploaded images by up to 70% while still maintaining its high quality. Besides that, EWWW Image Optimizer comes with lossless compression, which ensures that the image’s quality does not get tampered with during optimization.
Imagify is also a perfect WP Smush alternative for those who are seeking a free and high-quality WordPress image optimization plugin. The primary function of this plugin is to help your website reduce the file size of your images but maintain their quality. By minimizing image file sizes, you can improve website performance thanks to page load time reduction.
Moreover, this plugin supports multiple image formats such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF, so you are able to optimize plenty of images on your website. Another great feature is that Imagify allows you to automatically optimize images when you update them to your WordPress media library. Additionally, Imagify allows you to bulk-optimize existing images on your website, ensuring that your entire media library is optimized.
Main features:
Resize and compress images without losing quality
Convert webp for superior image compression
Optimize images to make your site faster and improve core web vitals
Support a variety of common formats as well as PDF format
Bulk optimization option
Free to choose a maximum width for all your images
There is no doubt that ShortPixel is considered one of the best WordPress image optimization plugins for most WordPress websites. This plugin utilizes sophisticated image compression algorithms to effectively reduce the size of images without compromising on their quality. In addition, it uses lossy compression – the most significant compression technique to achieve maximum size reduction while maintaining good image quality.
Further, it has the ability to automatically compress all existing and newly added images on your website. Another good feature is that you can select to specify custom settings for each image that you need to compress. There is also a bulk optimization feature, which is particularly useful if you have a large number of images that require compression.
Main features:
Compress JPG, PNG, GIF (still or animated) images and also PDF documents
Convert any JPEG, PNG, or GIF to WebP and AVIF
Easily add recurrent cron jobs for background optimization
Image Optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole is also an outstanding WP Smush plugin. Its features mainly focus on image optimization and lazy loading. It helps you automatically optimize all your images and deliver optimized images to your website visitors with the same quality. Additionally, it offers lazy loading functionality, which helps delay the loading of images until your users are actually needed.
Especially, Optimole utilizes a cloud-based infrastructure to serve the optimized images. This means that the plugin offloads the image optimization process to its servers, reducing the workload on your website’s hosting server. It also includes a global CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver optimized images efficiently to users across the globe.
With the assistance of Optimus, you can reduce the file size of updated media files automatically. While uploading pictures to the media library, the Optimus plugin sends the pictures to the Optimus server for processing. The server optimizes the images and returns them. The Optimus plugin then saves the optimized images in the media library with smaller file sizes.
Besides that, unnecessary data that image processing programs stored in image files but is not needed for displaying the image can be removed. This process helps to maintain the graphics quality while reducing the image size significantly. It is possible to retain the author, EXIF, and copyright information in the photos if desired, but the compression gains will be reduced accordingly.
The last WP Smush alternative that you can choose is TinyJPG. This plugin also has the ability to optimize all your images by integrating with prevalent image compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG. Your images will be compressed by 40-60% and PNG images by 50-80% without visible loss in quality. Thanks to that, your website will load faster and save a large of storage space and bandwidth.
Main features:
Automatically optimize new images on upload
Advanced background optimization to speed up your workflow
Optimize individual images already in your media library
Easy bulk optimization of your existing media library
Automatically resize huge image uploads
Display JPEG images more quickly with progressive JPEG encoding
Supports compression of animated PNG
Select which thumbnail sizes of an image may be optimized
Multisite support with a single API key
The final verdict
To sum up, there are several high-quality plugins that can be alternatives to WP Smush. You can consider all the WP Smush alternatives that we mentioned above. Hopefully, you can choose a suitable option for your requirements. If you are interested in any plugin, don’t forget to share your selection with us in the comment section.
Further, it is a great idea if you visit our website and discover tons of stunning, free WordPress themes.
Hello everyone! We’re Galussothemes content team, we love to write new blogs for WordPress everyday! Galusso Content Team is a part of IT4GO – The company houses talented young people who hold a strong passion for website development, designing, and marketing.
Interesting with this topic? You also interest with this articles:
