How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website by Optimizing Images

Note from TechPatio: This post has been written by Pankaj Solanki, a fellow web developer. He runs his own website development company in Jodhpur. He has been experimenting with WordPress the day he realized its powers. Here he is sharing how he improved his website speed. Over to you Pankaj…

---

When I was a student of web development, I and my peers used to evaluate a website based on how it looked and felt.

I remember, I would see a simple website and think that the developer is not creative.

Was I wrong? At that time I did not feel so.

Few months later, I had my own website up and running. Did I make my website anything fancy?

Nope, it was a simple WordPress website with a simple theme. By that time, I had realized that “Beautiful website is worthless, if it does not load up properly”.

There are people who are still using Crome 2.23 OR Mozilla 4 OR even Internet Explorer 4. How will your website satisfy their query?

If your website does not answer the user’s query, Google will not want to send you visitors. Same thing happens with website speed…

It all boils Down to Speed!

Tell me the last time, a website did not open for 3 seconds…5 seconds…10 seconds…20 seconds and you did not get angry and clicked on STOP button.

Happens all the time. This is how it feels to others when your website does not load up fast. The user experience is negative and Google dislikes it.

Another thing is, Website speed is one of those rare Google ranking factors that Google has confirmed officially.

So, if your WordPress website is slow, stay tuned! I am going to show you how to make it faster.

Tool we will Use to Measure Website Speed

I have tried many tools. The simplest and most effective tool is GTMetrix.

It gives you a lot of details like page load time, page size, location selection, Google Pagespeed grade, YSlow grade etc. Perfect for our use.

This tool is used by 155,000+ people every day. Guess how much popular is it?

Optimizing Images to Increase Website Speed

When I started experimenting with website speed, I analyzed the timeline showed by GTMetrix. The images were the files that took the most time to load and were large in size.

So, I had to find a way to stop loading all the images at once and reduce size of these images.

I am not saying that optimizing HTML, JavaScript, CSS and caching are not important. They are. But I will aim to optimize images here.

Reducing the Size of Images

Once upon a time, I asked one of my tech savvy friend, “Is there any way to reduce the size of an image while not losing its quality?”

He literally laughed on me with a “No”. Neither he nor I knew any software OR plugin that would do the work at that time.

Now, I know a software as well as a plugin that does this work.

The software is JPEG Mini. It is one of those premium softwares that has been very helpful. Just drag and drop images into the software. It will reduce their size, quality being same. It is amazing.

If you are more of a plugin guy, you can install EWWW Image Optimizer. It does the same work.

These both tools will reduce the size of your images and make your website images load faster.

Stop Loading All the Images aka Lazy Loading

This is a brilliant innovation. When a user comes to your website, he does not need to see all images at once.

What lazy loading does is load the images when user needs it. There are many plugins available at WordPress repository.

BJ Lazy load has worked best for me. It is simple plugin with simple options and it does the work effortlessly.

Conclusion

I did not tell you about 25 ways to speed up your website all at once. Because I don’t want to overwhelm you.

BTW, here is the GTMetrix score of one of my websites:

What are you waiting for? Install these 2 plugins right now and improve your site speed.

Your users and Google will thank you for it.

Tell me your story, how have you speeded up your site?