How to compress images on WordPress using Smush.it

Google is serious about page load times now thus the need to optimize our web pages for faster load speeds. IN a recent article on this blog titled “What are the best tools for speeding up a website”,  I reiterated the importance of fast page loading speed and also listed the best tools for speeding up a website. One of the factors that could slow down a page’s load speed is images, the number and size of images on a web page could slow down a page load speed.

When you have several images on a web page, the browser will have to also take several trips to your hosting server to fetch the images, and if the sizes of the images are large it will definitely consume more resources obtaining and delivering them, so you need to compress images on your WordPress blog to make them smaller while retaining the quality to reduce the load on your server and improve your page load time.

Today I intend to show you how to compress images on WordPress using Smush.it, Smush.it is a WordPress plugin that lets you compress images on your blog while retaining its original quality. Compressing images will help you reduce the sizes of the images while retaining the quality and dimensions.

So whether you are a new blogger or an old one who may have uploaded hundreds of images on your site, you will still find this plugin very useful in compressing the images you may have uploaded in the page and hence improving your site speed in general.

How to compress images on WordPress

First you have to download and install WP Smush.it plugin, and then activate the plugin on your dashboard.

Then navigate to Media > Bulk Smush.it and click on the “Run all my images through WP Smush.it right now”.

Remember this may take time to complete so be sure you have a lot of time on your hand especially if you have a lot of images on your site.

Or you can compress the images individually by navigating to Media > library and clicking on the Smush.it now link under every image.

After the images have been compressed with WP Smush.it, you will notice the reduction percentage on every image compressed as shown on the image above. This reduction in sizes will help the images load faster on a browser and make your site faster.

I hope you find this tutorial useful in improving your site speed and also in improving your search engine ranking. If you have any questions or contributions please feel free to use the comment section, I will be glad to help you in any capacity I can.

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