One thing that I’ve been doing a lot lately is helping people with their WordPress website performance. You may have noticed I’ve done some Cloudflare courses and they have come off the back of this (can’t recommend Cloudflare enough, by the way!).
One of the Pro features of Cloudflare is called “Polish”, which promises to optimise images in order to reduce their size and improve load times. I’ve never used this feature, as I have a free account (not Pro), but I’ve found an excellent service with a great WordPress plugin that does the same thing.
And it’s called… ShortPixel (referral link – you get some free credits, I get some free credits, it’s win-win!)
You can choose different compression levels…
- Lossy (good compression, reasonable quality)
- Glossy (goldilocks)
- Loseless (some compression, great quality)
There are loads of clever options, such as removing EXIF data (good for both compression and also privacy – you don’t want those GPS coordinates left hanging around!), converting to JPG or WEBP, downsizing images, and seamless Cloudflare integration.
The bulk optimisation process will run for all the images already on your site, give that a bit of time to run through, and then you can configure the plugin to run automatically for any image files that are uploaded, either through the admin panel or on the front end (if your site provides such functionality).
When you sign up, you get an API key which you can use on as many WordPress sites as you want to. And there are a number of plans…
- Free – 150 credits/month (this is what I use)
- Short – 7,500 credits/month – $4.99
- Large – 18,000 credits/month – $9.99
- XXL – 82,500 credits/month – $29.99
- Yearly – 180,000 credits/month – $49.00
You can also bulk buy a set of credits, which never expire – these are great because it will always use your monthly ones first and then fall back to these if you go over, so they make a great contingency.
For me one of the biggest benefits is that this is all handled by their servers, rather than some plugins which do it locally. This not only takes up vital server resources (especially if you’ve not splashed out for a hefty hosting package) but can also require technical setup in terms of getting the right PHP libraries enabled and working. This is plug and play – immediate success!
So check out ShortPixel and maybe use this referral link – we’ll both get some free credits, so it’s a win-win.
Addition
There is currently an AppSumo deal for lifetime access to the ShortPixel Large plan for $39 – go and grab it before they run out!