Conor
Elite Member
- Nov 7, 2012
- 3,621
- 6,217
This is just a quick one, but something I learnt after much trial and error. Hopefully it'll save some people a bit of hassle.
When speeding up a website, I've found that one of the top "slowness" factors are images that have not been compressed for the web. They contain unnecessary EXIF tags, they don't render efficiently and they're just making the site unnecessarily slow.
There are a bunch of Wordpress plugins that are supposed to handle these images and make them more web friendly.
None of them work
Trust me on this, I've used "smush it" in the past, I've used tinypng's official plugin and the better one that actually does work to an extent. None of them are effective enough to rely on. The reason for this is because they only optimise the images they can detect in your media library, and even then they don't always work as well as they should. Images in other directories, plugin icons, etc, these are all ignored by the supposed "best" wordpress image optimisation plugins.
I have a better way of doing it.
This will require a little bit of work, but I've found it's the most thorough way of handling your images.
When speeding up a website, I've found that one of the top "slowness" factors are images that have not been compressed for the web. They contain unnecessary EXIF tags, they don't render efficiently and they're just making the site unnecessarily slow.
There are a bunch of Wordpress plugins that are supposed to handle these images and make them more web friendly.
None of them work
Trust me on this, I've used "smush it" in the past, I've used tinypng's official plugin and the better one that actually does work to an extent. None of them are effective enough to rely on. The reason for this is because they only optimise the images they can detect in your media library, and even then they don't always work as well as they should. Images in other directories, plugin icons, etc, these are all ignored by the supposed "best" wordpress image optimisation plugins.
I have a better way of doing it.
This will require a little bit of work, but I've found it's the most thorough way of handling your images.
- Access your site via FTP
- Make a local backup of your entire wp-content directory.
- Download "File Optimizer" (http://nikkhokkho.sourceforge.net/static.php?page=FileOptimizer)
- Drag the backed up wp-content directory into File Optimizer, click "Optimize All Files" and leave it to do its thing.
- Reupload the modified wp-content directory via FTP. Remember to overwrite all files that are a different size to the originals.
