Optimize Images For Faster Load Time

Sep 4, 2019 | WordPress Plugins, WordPress Wednesday

When you use larger images on your website it’s best to optimize images as you upload them to your WordPress website. Kori Ashton offers a free option to help you do just that.

Full Transcript

Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton. Today we’re going to be looking at a free resource on how to use, inside of WordPress, an optimization tool to optimize all of your images so that they’re loading quickly and easily for all of your viewers, Google is gonna love you too.

Before I move forward, I’ve gotta tell you about our incredible sponsor and host, Liquid Web is gonna be the most helpful humans and hosting. If you’re running a WordPress website, I’m gonna highly recommend that you use this coupon code here, get over there and get some of the best hosting support you could ever find inside the WordPress world. They’re not only gonna help you with your hosting so that your website is fast and secure, but they can answer WordPress questions like this whenever you stumble upon something, so you’re not just having to go to YouTube to find an answer, you can actually call them up, live chat with them and get an answer for all your WordPress questions.

If you’re interested in my health journey, stick around, I’ll give you an update at the end of this, but for now, let’s talk about image optimization inside of WordPress.

So, whenever you’re Googling around for an image optimizer, you’re probably finding options like this online that are free to use, you’ve got quite a few different options that appeared inside of my Google search that I was thinking, okay, but I’m not gonna sit here and read all the fine print, what if they can now use my images that I’m uploading using their free service? What if they can take my image and do whatever they want to with it? I don’t think so, so I don’t trust little free stuff like that, what I’d rather do is find a vetted, really good plugin that I can put into my website, knowing that moving forward, any image I upload is automatically gonna be optimized for best viewing experience.

And these resources that I’m about to show you allow you to go back into your media gallery, into your media library, allowing you to make changes and optimize all those images that already live there. Then you don’t have to go back and re-upload them or be sure they get to the right page, you don’t have to worry about any of that.

Smush Image Optimizer Plugin

This is the beauty of this first plugin I’m gonna tell you about called Smush and it allows you to upload 50 at a time, allowing you to optimize 50 images with one click, check that out. So that’s pretty fantastic and this again is in the budget of free, if you wanted to buy the premium version you’d get a lot more bells and whistles. One of the other things I love about this is it is award-winning, it has over a million active installs, people using this, it’s already compatible with the version that we’re using and it’s already tested up to seven days ago, as of this video, so you know this is ready to be used.

reSmush Plugin

This is a great option, as well as reSmush it, this is another one that I think is really great, doesn’t have as many active users, but has really great reviews, a lot of positive things about it and I just wanna give you two options so you don’t feel like I’m just pushing one specific plugin.

Smush Plugin Installation

But, for the sake of now and this tutorial, I’m gonna show you how this works, we’re actually gonna go in now and put this into AskKori.com and optimize my images. Let’s go do it! All right y’all, once you’re logged in your dashboard, you know that if you’re running the self-hosted version of WordPress, you’re able to go to plugins and click add new, that’s all you have to do. Jump over here, we’re gonna go look in the repository, right here on the right side and we’re gonna look for Smush. That’s all you’re gonna do, just type in Smush and there it is, lady Smush, we need to check her out.

We’re gonna go ahead and click install now because we’ve already vetted it. Now pause for a minute, in the future, if you’re watching this video, I need you to be sure you have a backup of your website in place and also be certain that this is still optimized and has great reviews and has been updated and ready to run with the version of WordPress that you’re using.

As of today, I’m using 5.2.2, this works beautifully with it. So I’ve already done that, now I’m gonna click activate so that I’m activating the plugin and able to use it now. Now that I’ve done it, you can scroll down here to the bottom and you’re gonna see, on the left side, a Smush dashboard. Click on that, go to that area.

Smush Tutorial

This is something that they’re gonna walk you through a very easy tutorial if you wanna begin setup you can just kinda go through here. Automatically optimize new uploads, of course, we want it to do that, so we’re gonna allow that setting to be in place. What that means is, moving forward, any image you ever try to upload, it’s gonna automatically try to optimize it for you.

Strip my image metadata, so this is something you might wanna do in order to allow that compression to really take place, I’m gonna click next.

Enable lazy load, this allows an image to kind of unfold as the page unloads, I think it’s really important that you do this because it allows for faster page load time, it’s great, Google loves it.

So be sure to allow all of these, finish setup wizard, you’re perfectly fine if you’re gonna allow Smush to do some tracking for you, you can leave that last option available.

And now you’re off and ready to go and we can do a bulk Smush right now with up to 50 images.

Now, it’s telling me I have over 1700 images living inside of this website, but I can go ahead and do 50 right now and it’s gonna run, you’re gonna see right here it’s gonna take it’s time and run through the whole process.

I’ll pause the video and come back to this in just a second.

All right, that actually didn’t take long at all, it already did 50 images for me, it’s gonna show me here that I have the additional 1713 attachments or media files that could be Smushed and it says that I can actually do it again, so it looks like 50 images per click.

If you upgrade to the pro version, you’ll end up being able to do them all at once, really, really, quickly.

But you’ll see that we’re already saving space and that means a better user experience. Let me show you what that process looks like if we wanna upload to our library so that you can see the Smushing take effect.

Uploading to Media Library with Smush Plugin

So, I’m just gonna upload like you regularly would, into your media library, choose a picture that you like, grab it, upload it, it’s automatically gonna upload like it normally would, you really don’t see the difference of anything happening.

Once you actually go into your library now, I’ve actually uploaded this picture twice so let me be sure I view the correct picture, so it’s this one right here, it’s gonna say that it’s already been optimized right down here, Smush, seven images reduced, that’s it right there.

So it’s good to note that it’s not taking up any extra time in the upload version and it’s not gonna slow you down at all.

You can also go into any individual picture that you already have in here and go ahead and optimize it. So let’s say we go to this picture, you can see here it’s not been processed, so it’s gonna allow us to Smush it. We’re gonna Smush the image, now 50 images optimize was in bulk, all at once, but if there were some larger images in your website that you kinda wanna go back and do, you can go in here and do it. It’s gonna say, already optimized, taken care of.

Not bad right, kinda cool that you can do all of this at one time, on the budget of free, getting it done so that you’re optimizing your images, improving your load time, improving your user experience overall and it’s so important that you do this, especially if you have beautiful, large images on your website.

I hope this has helped y’all, stick around for my health update, if not, I’ll catch you next WordPress Wednesday, bye everyone!

Health Update

Hey y’all, thanks for stickin’ around at the end of the video to hear about how I am battling and conquering cervical cancer. As of July 1st, 2019, I was diagnosed with it. It’s been about a two-month process now.

I’ve been going through six weeks of radiation and chemo since where the tumor is, it’s pretty much inoperable and it’s so large, I was actually going through pain, physical pain for 19 months before they could catch this thing, so I challenge each one y’all, if y’all have any aches and pains, be the squeaky wheel, be your own advocate and don’t take no for answer when the doctors tell you all the images say there’s nothing going on. That was definitely my case, so now I am moving forward with a great diet, I’m on the Keto Diet, and absolutely no sugar and I’m taking good care of myself, a lot of vitamins, a lot of great nutrition happenin’ to build up my immune system and I am getting stronger. Not only by that, but also by your amazing encouragement.

So thank you so much for all the tweets and the DMs and the emails and the GIFs y’all have been sending. I even had an amazing guy and his family send my boys some Nerf guns, he told me that sometimes he knows that kids can get bored when mom doesn’t feel like doing a whole lot and he’s right, when I’m exhausted after chemo. It’s been a wonderful distraction for ’em so thanks Russ, to you and your whole family. I appreciated all the love, all the support.

Thank you so much for the comments on all the videos. It’s really what makes me wanna get back to the studio every single week and make another video helping you improve all of your online marketing. Y’all are a total encouragement to me, thanks so much! And I will see y’all next WordPress Wednesday, bye everyone.