
By ensuring that you’re selecting the proper image format, quality, and a few other settings, you’ll be well on your way to improving your website. You can manually optimize images in programs like Photoshop, Pixelmator, or Affinity Photo. Uncompressed images can contain additional bulk that should be removed when you save your files for the web, once you already have an image, or once it’s already on your website. Some techniques can be used before an image makes it to your website and some by directly modifying your server configuration and the way that the site handles images.

There are many ways that WordPress website owners can improve load speeds. Google uses a term called “time to first meaningful paint,” which is when “the user feels that the primary content of the page is visible.” The faster users get to the information they’re looking for, the better off you will be. The general idea is to reduce how many requests you have to make or how large those requests are in the first place. Image optimization is just that, optimizing, compressing, scaling, resizing, or changing image formats for the web. By optimizing images, you can reduce the overall impact of your website’s footprint, page size, and increase load speeds. If you think about images as a percentage of your overall website’s footprint, a few bytes here and there will certainly add up. One of the best ways to improve UX and guarantee site speed is to consistently practice techniques for WordPress website image optimization. The guiltiest speed hogs are network requests dedicated to fetching images and video media.


Ensuring that your site moves quickly and supports speeds down to mobile 3G is vital in providing the best possible user experience (UX) to the largest percentage of your target demographic. The most significant consideration for building or maintaining a website these days is speed.
