“You’re losing visitors because your site is too slow.” This statement is true for almost everyone. The longer it takes a page to load, the more likely your readers will leave. Research shows that the bounce rate increases with your page load time. One of the most impactful improvements you can make is to reduce the file size of your images. Reducing the volume of data sent to your web browser can dramatically decrease page load time. If you’re using WordPress, you’re in luck, since there are a plethora of plugins that can automate this task for you. At Solid Digital, we rely on these plugins to help our customers, so we decided to compare them to figure out which ones perform the best.
In an ideal world, content editors would optimize images before they upload them. When this doesn’t happen, image optimization plugins can step in and help out. They will generally resize image files to make them smaller. Most of them require a little tinkering to set up and find the ideal balance between optimized images and ones that look essentially unchanged from the original.
We evaluated some of the most popular image optimization plugins and decided to compare their performance, price, and key features.