![]() Except it does it without needing a WordPress plugin. Among the solutions that come with Cloudflare are protection against spam/attacks, image optimization, SSL encryption, and other site optimizations.Ĭloudflare includes a service called Cloudflare Polish that does essentially what Smush Pro does: it automatically compresses images so their file size is smaller. So if a user requests to see your blog, the request will first pass through Cloudflare. What’s Cloudflare? It’s a suite of tools that sits between your blog’s hosting server and the internet. This is a more advanced option as you’ll need to set up Cloudflare, which does get quite technical (and the setup of it is best outsourced if you’re not familiar with the details).īut I also think it’s the best option for reasons I will explain. Smush can take care of this automatically, only showing webp versions on browsers that can handle it. The one tricky bit with webp though is that older browsers don’t support it, so you always have to have both webp and jpeg/png versions of images at the same time. Google Sitespeed reports will recommend you to use webp if you’re not. This is a file format that’s newer than JPEG and PNG and that results in smaller files. I’ve had the Pro version for a while as it enables the option of using the webp format. It’s a free plugin but there’s also a Pro version with extra features. Smush normally does this whenever you upload new images, but you can also tell it to go through your existing image library to optimize it. It can process all your image files and make them a fair bit smaller without noticeable quality loss. Smush is a popular image optimization plugin that I’ve used on my blog as well. This option will burden your WordPress site with an extra plugin and it will make image uploads a little bit slower, but the advantage is that you can install it once and then forget about it. That’s super handy if you’re a photographer. JPEGmini also has a Lightroom plugin that lets you apply it to photos when exporting from Adobe Lightroom. You can drag files into the app and they’ll be instantly compressed. ![]() I used this for many years as it’s a quick and easy way to compress your JPEGs. ![]() It automatically chooses the setting for your photos/images at just the right level where it doesn’t degrade quality in a noticeable way. Sometimes it’s okay to go to a quality setting as low as 4 (if you’re image is only used as a background for example) but 6 or 7 is best for any photos that will be front and center.Īnother way of saving JPEGs at the right quality level is using an app like JPEGmini. You can try setting a JPEG to quality 1 or 2 and you’ll surely see the image become much less sharp and have lots of small swirlies in it where the data gets corrupted. JPEG is a ‘lossy’ file format which means that the image will visibly degrade the more you compress it. Don’t set the quality to maximum! Choose something like 6 for a decent balance between image quality and file size. When saving your JPEG files in your image app, you’re typically presented with a quality slider with values ranging from 0 to 10.
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