Optimizing and compressing an image is very important for fast loading of any website. Many webmasters compress their images to the best possible extent, so that it reduces the loading time of the website. The more the size of images, the more time it takes to load those images, more server load and also the possibility that the server will crash in case of traffic spike (e.g. from sites like digg, stumble upon, etc). So how to compress images, without losing the visual quality ? There are some image compression technologies which helps us do this. When compressing images, you won’t want to take a chance on the quality of the images, right. In this article, we will be looking at some of the best image optimization and compression tools available online.
Compress Pictures Online Using SmushIT
Smush.it uses optimization techniques specific to image format to remove unnecessary bytes from image files. It is a “lossless” tool, which means it optimizes the images without changing their look or visual quality and maintains image’s quality. Smush.it is a service by the Yahoo Exceptional Performance team, which promotes best practices for improving web page performance. Basically this smushit removes extra metadata from images, and compresses the image using various optimization algorithm.
The best part is that you don’t need to install any software or purchase anything. Its an online tool, so if you have the image on your Computer, then upload it and after smush process is complete, you can download that image with reduced size. You can even upload multiple files. But the more files, the more time it will take to compress them. Or if the image is on some website, then just provide its full URL. Look at the self explanatory screenshot below:
For testing purposes, here’s an image uploaded to smush.it and it compressed it upto 1.24% (1024 bytes). If you are satisfied by the result, then click on “Download smushed image” button and then save the zipped file to your Computer. You will need to unzip it.
Free Image Optimizer
Free Image Optimizer is another useful online tool to resize, compress and optimize your image files. This online tool also has quality option, so that you can select the type of quality of the output file. Also it supports resize option, so you just need to enter the width and height of the image (in pixels).
WP Smushit Plugin for WordPress users
If you have a WordPress Blog, then here’s a plugin for this same purpose. All you have to do is to just install and activate this plugin and you’re good to go. You don’t need to do anything else. Now whenever a image is uploaded in a page or post, this plugin will automatically run each images through Smush.it (behind the scenes).
So for WordPress user’s this is a very good method to compress images and reduce page’s loading time. If the images are in “Media Library”, then you can process existing image files to smushit by going to Media Library and clicking on Smush.it now.
Download WP SMush.it Plugin
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