Looking for the best WordPress image optimization plugins?
Images are an important ingredient for crafting engaging blog posts. They also help convey your message much easier. Unfortunately, if not properly handled, images can result in a slow-loading page and poor SEO.
In this article, we’ll show you our expertly curated list of the best WordPress image optimization plugins you should consider for your website.
In This Article
What is Image Optimization?
Image optimization is the practice of altering the images you use in your content so they load fast, look good, and take up less space on servers. It also involves making your images more SEO-friendly.
The Importance of Optimizing Images in WordPress
Why should you invest time and resources in image optimization?
There are several reasons for doing so. However, here are some of the most prominent ones:
- Helps improve your Page Experience: Page Experience is an important ranking signal that Google uses based on the user experience (UX) your page offers.
- Increases your visibility on SERPs: Optimized images are more discoverable in image search, helping make your content more visible.
- Boosts conversion rates: Pages with optimized images load faster, resulting in an increase in dwell time and, ultimately, a boost in conversion rates.
- Saves server resources: Optimized images take up less server space, thereby requiring fewer server resources.
Because of the high importance of image optimization, you need to invest in the best WordPress image optimization plugins. These will help you craft content that follows SEO best practices.
The Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins: Expertly Picked
Choosing the right image optimization plugin for your WordPress site can be difficult, given the many available options. That’s why we’ve taken the hard work out of this and curated a list of our expert picks.
So, let’s jump right in.
1. EWWW: Best WebP Converter
If you want to convert already published and new images to WebP, EWWW is the best WordPress image optimization plugin for this. WebP is a file format that’s been proven to be the best for improving page load speed. So, if your pages are laggy because of unoptimized images, this is one of the plugins to consider, especially since it comes with a bulk image optimization feature.
Not only does EWWW convert images into WebP format, but it also handles all types of image compression and can be used on any image file format. It also comes with lazy loading, automatic scaling, and much more.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $70/year.
2. All In One SEO (AIOSEO): Best Overall Image SEO Plugin
AIOSEO is a powerful WordPress SEO plugin boasting over 100 million downloads. It’s trusted by over 3 million savvy website owners to help boost their search rankings and drive more traffic to their sites. AIOSEO has many features and modules designed to help you optimize your website for SEO.
One of its most powerful features is the Image SEO module.
The Image SEO feature is designed to help you rank better for image search. It enables you to optimize your image titles, alt tags, captions, descriptions, and file names easily.
The plugin also makes it easy to implement sitewide image SEO settings or simply choose the pages and posts to implement them on. You can also choose terms to exclude from your image metadata. This helps get rid of unnecessary stop words.
AIOSEO’s Image SEO module helps you optimize image metadata. This, in turn, makes it easy for search engines to understand what your images are about, thereby making it easier for them to index your content properly. It also makes it easier for you to rank higher for image search, a popular yet untapped area of SEO.
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $49.60/year for a single site license.
3. Optimole: Best Image Compression and Lazy Load Plugin
Optimole is another plugin that ranks high among the best WordPress image optimization plugins. It’s a powerful image compression plugin that offers different compression options. Besides image compression, Optimole also comes with industry-leading lazy loading capabilities. These 2 powerful features help ensure that your images don’t slow down your page load times.
Another feature that sets Optimole apart from other image compression plugins is that it can serve retina images, which usually have double the number of pixels in the same space as traditional screens.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $19.08/month with support for up to 25,000 visitors per month.
4. Smash Ballon: Best Image SEO Plugin for Social Media Feeds
Smash Balloon is another powerful WordPress plugin you should consider if you use many images on your website.
While the plugin’s primary function is that of a social feed plugin, it also has some powerful image SEO functionalities. For instance, Smash Ballon resizes your images to the correct dimensions and reduces image file size for faster loading and easy social sharing. The plugin also has an intelligent caching system that helps improve image loading speeds.
Pricing: Starts at $49/social media platform/year. Alternatively, you can get the All Access Bundle for $209.30/year.
5. Imsanity: Best Image Resizing Plugin
If you need a WordPress image optimizing plugin focusing more on resizing than compression, then Imsanity is it. The plugin lets you specify your site’s optimum image dimensions and the required quality level.
One of the advantages of Imdsanity is that it can handle bulk resizing easily. This makes it a great option for content-heavy sites.
Pricing: Free.
6. Infinite Uploads: Best Storage and CDN Plugin
Infinite Uploads is a fantastic image storage and CDN plugin for WordPress. One of the biggest drawbacks of images is that they take up a lot of storage space, thereby increasing your server bandwidth requirements. It also results in slower websites and more expensive hosting solutions.
Infinite Uploads solves all those problems by moving your uploads directory to cloud storage and serving them from a super-fast CDN.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $192/year.
The Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugin: Our Top Picks
If you’re looking for the best WordPress image optimization plugin, then EWWW is your best option. It handles most image optimization functions pretty well and comes with a friendly price tag.
We also recommend AIOSEO as it’s super easy to use and has a robust feature set designed to help rank your images and other content formats much easier.
However, if you’re on a shoestring budget and are looking for the best free WordPress image optimization plugin, then we highly recommend Imsanity.
We hope this article helped you pick the right WordPress image optimization plugin for your site. Once you’re done optimizing your images, you may also want to see our tutorial on how to redirect a page or post in WordPress. Or perhaps you’ll find our article on how to boost your blog post’s CTR more useful.
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