How To Compress Your Images and Boost Even Further Your Website's Performance

First of all let's have a quick look at the problem in hand: Most of the images that we use in our Wordpress sites contain bytes which are unnecessary. Therefore it would be nice, if we had a clever and easy to implement solution to take these bytes out of the way (obviously without touching the picture quality AT ALL!).

This would mean smaller images and faster sites. And this applies to all of us whether we use only a few smaller images for our articles and pages, or whether we keep an image-heavy site.

WP Smush.It Plugin

WP Smush.It Plugin is basically an image optimization project run by Yahoo in the context of their YSlow methodology of analyzing website's performance.

Smush.It is utilizing specific optimization techniques for each individual file format in order to remove, as mentioned above, the unnecessary bytes from the image files that we use. The techniques it uses are "lossless", which means that the optimization is achieved without changing the quality of the image.

This brilliant functionality is offered to us with the ease of use of a Wordpress plugin.

All you have to do is install and activate it. After you're done, visit your Wordpress media library and click the "Smush.it now!" link on each individual image you want to compress. Of course you can also select to do a batch edit of all your uploaded images, so that you can optimize all your media with one click.