Best WordPress Image Compression Plugins in 2018

If your WordPress website is loading really slow, you might want to install a WordPress image compression plugin.

The images in your website makes your article more engaging and captivating.

However, it is also true that the images have way larger sizes compared to the text files of your HTML, CSS and JS codes in your website combined.

This means that loading all the images will make your website load slower thus affecting user experience. Furthermore, website load speed is one of the many factors that affects your SEO ranking.

In order to solve this you will need to optimize your images. You can either do this manually by editing your images and saving them optimized for the web.

Or you can use the more practical method of installing one of the best image optimization and compression plugins below which will do this for you automatically.

Here are the best WordPress image compression plugins in 2018.

1. Smush Image Compression

Smush Image Compression, better known as Smush, is currently the most popular image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress.

It has been downloaded and installed more than 1 million times and has a superb 5-star rating from its users.

Smush is developed by the superteam WPMU Dev and has been a crowd favorite since it was first release.

Some of the other key features of Smush plugin are:

1. Image resizing
2. Compress images in any directory
3. Compatible with other media library

Smush also offers a Pro version which you will get by signing up to the WPMU Dev membership. Alongside this, you will also have access to all their other premium plugins.

2. ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is a plugin developed by a company whose main focused is image optimization. Thus making their product absolutely feature packed.

Aside from images compression the plugin can also compressed PDF documents of your website.

Some of the other key features of ShortPixel are:

1. Works with other media library
2. Offers both lossly and lossless compression
3. Offers glossy JPEG compression
4. Animated images compression
5. Convert JPEG, GIF or PNG to WebP
6. Compatible with Retina 2x
7. Integrates with Gravity Form post_image field
8. CMYK to RGB Conversion
   

Knowing how powerful the ShortPixel is, they can easily get away with being 100% paid service. But we are very lucky that they are still offering a free version for 100 images per month.

If you need to optimize more than that per month then you can go ahead and signup for their paid plans.

3. EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer is another image compression plugin developed by a company whose main focus is image optimization.

However unlike the ShortPixel, the EWWW core plugin is always free so you can use the image compression without having an account on the EWWW website.

But if you want to go paid and use the API, they rest assure that you will never be billed for any images they didn’t compress.

Some of the key features of EWWW are:

1. No Speed Limits
2. Unlimited File Size
3. JPEG, PNG and PDF Compression
4. WebP Image Generation
5. Works with any Media Library
6. Free Image Backup for 30 Days

The great thing about the paid version of EWWW is that they charge you per image optimized.

This means that if you got months that you have little activity publishing in your website then you would be charge less compared to the competitions.

4. reSmush.it Image Optimizer

Unlike the other plugins in this list, reSmush.it is completely free but it only accepts images up to 5MB.

The plugin uses the reSmush.it API and accepts JPG, PNG and GIF images files.

The plugin accepts bulk operations and you can change your optimization level anytime. You can also exclude specific images just in case you want to upload a full image.

Currently, reSmush.it has already optimized more than 3,000,000,000 images while still completely free.

You also do not have to be afraid about losing your original image as the plugin creates a copy of the image before optimizing.

5. Compress JPEG & PNG

Compress JPEG & PNG images plugin is a by-product of the popular compression services TinyJPG and TinyPNG.

This plugin supports compression and optimization of JPEG, PNG and Animated PNG images.

Some of the key features of Compress JPEG & PNG are:

1. Animated PNG Compression
2. MultiSite Support with Single API Key
3. WooCommerce Compatible
4. WP Retine 2x Compatible
5. WP Offload S3 Compatible
6. Convert CMYK to RGB
7. No File Size Limit

Compress JPEG & PNG plugin has a 500 images per month limit, however the limit also counts the different sizes you have on your website.

This means that if you generate 5 different image sizes on each image upload, that means you would only be good for 100 images per month.

Conclusion

If you only need to compress JPEG and PNG images, you can honestly choose from any of the services above as they are all proven to compress these image formats effectively.

However when you also need to compress GIF, PDF or Animated PNG then that is when your search will narrow down.