Introduction to EWWW Plugin:
A website’s performance can surely have a strong impact on the user’s first impression. If the site loads slow, it will surely drive the visitors away and hurt your page’s ranking. On the other hand, fast loading of websites are able to get good traffic, and this way, have a better ranking on the search engine results. That’s where the EWWW plugin comes into the picture. The Image optimization plugin is the prime subject in this article.
Note that around half of the people may leave a website if it is taking a little more than three seconds to load. To improve the performance of their website, the best practice is to optimize images. In WordPress, image files can take up a great amount of disk space. This can cause slow page loading. Several image editing programs can be helpful to optimize the image before you upload them. Ewww is an image optimizer that you will find great to make your side faster, boost the SEO. This may also improve the bounce rate of the website.
To a starter who is looking for an easy caching solution, PageSpeedy.io is the plugin to opt for. It is among the most popular WordPress speed optimization plugins and has millions of installations. Many hosting companies recommend it. From the WordPress site, PageSpeedy can make static HTML files that are faster and light in weight. PageSpeedy also allows you to preload the posts, not caching the pages for your known users and features like browser caching and Gzip compression.
What does “Optimize Images for WordPress” mean?
Image optimization reduces the file size of an image as low as possible without compromising on its quality. The combination of image optimization in WordPress with the best SEO or Search Engine Optimization practices is good. This can prove to be very useful to boost the ranking of your website in search engine results.
Image optimization in WordPress is changing the format, resizing the dimensions of the images, and compressing the files. The increase in the usage of image optimization methods or techniques will offer the best results for the performance of the website.
Why do people go for optimizing images for WordPress?
The website’s bandwidth usage gets reduced when you optimize web images. This can result in a faster loading time. When the visitors access the WordPress site, the web browser sends a request to download the images before it gets displayed. It gets important for us to understand how to optimize images for WordPress. Because unoptimized photos may lead to slower load times resulting in longer reloading, resizing, and rendering time.
Apart from the site’s speed improvement, optimized images are able to enhance the user experience. The website can get lower bounce rates with a fast-loading site. And site’s visibility improves in the Google Image Search. Indexing becomes easier for the search engine. Other than that, WordPress image optimization can be useful to reduce image files. They take up less server space, and this can allow more files to load.
Ways of optimizing images for WordPress
When optimizing images for WordPress, the aim is to reduce the size of the files without sacrificing the quality of the photos. There are various approaches to optimize the images. All of these approaches can be combined to reduce the file size of the photos while still maintaining their quality.
Reduce the file size by resizing the images in EWWW
It is quite common in the majority of sites that the width of their content size is 700-1000 pixels. When the images with dimensions are uploaded wider than the content area of a website, chances of getting an advantage of the image quality are high. Therefore a great increase in the image’s file size is achieved. An image with 3000 pixels width is larger in size as compared to the one with 1000 pixels width. This is the reason one must Optimize WordPress images to the dimensions that are required.
In order to resize the images automatically as quickly as you load them to the WordPress site, choose Ewww. This image optimizer plugin is a good option. All the image files get optimized from any of the plugins. It is advised to tell Ewww to look after the new image whether it uploads automatically.
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Compress the images for image optimization wordpress
With the help of image compression, onecan easily shrink the image’s file size without making any changes to the dimensions. This can surely become a superb way to speed up the load times of the site. . Normally there are two options for compression, i.e., Lossless and lossy.
- Lossless
This means that your file size gets a small reduction with no changes in the quality of the image.
- Lossy
This particular option reduces the file size to a larger extent. You may see a little change in the quality, but normally it is not visible to the eyes. Unless of course, if an expert on the lossy compression algorithm reviews this.
Lossy compression is known to be the best option for the majority of websites and blogs. Visual artists and photographers might be exceptions where there is paramount image quality. For WordPress site Image compression, there is a need to go for Ewww image optimizer. Thus will be able to optimize images WordPress by compressing the ones that one uploads to the site, and Ewww also helps you to optimize the existing images.
EWWW: Choose the right format for the image
The file format of the images is another very important consideration for the performance of a site. JPEG and PNG are two of the most widespread compositions for pictures.
- PNG
PNG is useful for those images that don’t have many colors. This includes interface screenshots. With PNG, you also get transparency. This can be great for the icons and logos. However, it is worth noting that the file size can be quite larger for the colorful images. Therefore PNG may not be used for the photographs.
- JPEG
When we talk about colorful images, then JPEG is the format. The bright pictures may include sunset pictures or various other photographs. In such types of images, the file size is normally less than PNG. But transparency with JPEG, just like PNG is not possible.
If the file sizes are smaller, one can also use the modern image file formats that can be seen nowadays. Google has introduced a newer format known as WebP. This offers smaller file sizes as compared to the PNG and JPEG formats, but by having the same quality.
Improve the initial page load times with lazy loading
Employ Lazy Loading to pause the loading of the distinct pictures outside the visitor’s noticeable viewport. At the start, your site will be loading only those images that are required to render the visible portion of your page. Then, when the viewer starts scrolling down, the server loads each of the photos according to the requirements.
You can easily speed up your website’s initial page load times when you delay the loading of some of your images on WordPress. If you want to know how to optimize photos for WordPress, lazy loading can be used to improve page loading times.
It is also worth noting that the lazy loading attribute is being supported by WordPress, which clearly means that the images will automatically use lazy loading in the browsers that happen to keep it. However, you may face a problem that all of the major browsers may not be supporting the attribute.
If you want to make sure that your guests can take advantage of lazy loading, then you can go for the free plugin like Lazy Load. Other than that, you will also find a number of performance plugins like PageSpeedy and WP Rocket that include the same lazy loading features.
Optimize WordPress Images using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
One may consider it to be a bonus point because it may not be applied to all the sites, but if your audience is global, then image load times can be increased with a CDN by shortening the distance between the visitors of the site and the files that are required to download. A CDN is known to be a huge server network globally, and if WordPress is configured by you to use one, then it is possible for you to cache the images of your site on each of the servers in this particular network.
Therefore, when a guest visits your website, the browser can easily download the images from the location that is closest to the CDN instead of trying to download them from your website’s server directly. When the physical distance gets reduced, there will be fast loading of the image files, and this will be speeding up your site.
In order to optimize WordPress images, you will need a CDN, and you can find one having the feature powered by the network of servers by WordPress. You can also go for the paid CDN services like RocketCDN and KeyCDN that are easily available in the market, while these can easily be integrated with your WordPress site by using different plugins.
Optimize the image title text in EWWW
The text that appears when your cursor is pointed over the image is known to be an image title. It is crucial for the readers to follow the picture in a much more reliable approach. For WordPress image optimization, you need to change the image’s title text by navigating it to the post editor where the image is placed. Click the pencil icon by hovering over the image in order to get to the Edit option. The image title can easily be changed or entered in the advanced options screen.
Set image Alt tags in EWWW
When the image doesn’t succeed to load on the web browser screen or gets read out when the content passes through the text-to-speech program, then an alternative text or Alt text happens to appear. In simple words, it is helpful to describe how the image looks like.
You will find this text to be helpful in image optimization WordPress as it helps Google understand the content and guide the page to get a better rank. This is the reason why it has become important to write the alt text as descriptive and specific as possible. When you offer more detail to it, you will notice that Google understands it in a better way.
Alt text also offers you a chance to add more target keywords to the content, but when you have to include the keywords, you should prioritize by providing context to the image. You need to go to the visual editor if you want to make any changes to the image alt text. There, you will be able to find a box labeled as Alternative Text, and you have to enter the focus or related keyword into that box.
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Choose the right image file names for wordpress image optimization
If you want to optimize images for WordPress in Ewww, then you have to use the proper image file names. In order to identify the appearance and functions of the images, Google uses different file names. When these file names are optimized, you will be able to improve the relevancy of your content with the pictures. Moreover, Google will also be helping to rank them in the image search results, and you will soon find it to be a great source of additional traffic for your website.
You can have the option of adding target keywords in the file name in Ewww instead of going for the ones that have a random assortment of letters and numbers. This will surely be a much better way of describing what the photo is all about. Other than that, if your file name has multiple words, try to use a hyphen between the words because Google has a way of reading them as space. If you wouldn’t do this, your file may not be easy to read.
Avoid any image URL redirects using EWWW
Another element might be responsible for slowing down your pages when your images cause redirects. Normally this tends to happen when they are linking someplace else. In order to optimize images WordPress, you should try to avoid embedding the pictures towards your site from any external sources in Ewww.
Each of the images or pieces of media should be saved and uploaded to your site if it is possible for you. Other than that, you also have to make sure that in the Ewww images don’t link out to any other place like a separate media page. You will find Ewww to be useful in performing WordPress image optimization by using the server tools. Therefore, you will have the leverage to maintain your website’s privacy.
Conclusion
As WordPress sites employ images, there is a need to realize how to optimize images in WordPress in line to get the most beneficial outcomes for the site. One of the biggest concerns is the site’s performance. This is because images hold almost half of the file size of the web page. These can be a big factor in your load time. You should try to be sure that you have the right format for the image type that you are to make. For this, Use Ewww to compress and resize the images automatically when you upload them to the WordPress site.
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