ShortPixel Review : If you want your blog to be a success, you need a website that loads fast. A quick-loading blog has happier visitors and it also helps you rank higher on Google.
Nobody likes to type in an address and wait forever for the page to load. A page that loads painfully slow has a negative impact on the visitors. Time is of essence.
In fact, a quick-loading website is now more important than ever as Google has made it a search engine ranking factor.
There are all kinds of ways to help load your website faster. But one of the most important things you can do is optimize your images.
As per Akamai, images make up 63% of an average website’s file size. Because they’re such a big part of your site, finding ways to reduce their size is going to make a big difference to your website’s loading time.
To help you optimize images on your WordPress site easily, I decided to share this ShortPixel review to show you how this plugin can easily optimize your site’s images.
In my tests, ShortPixel was able to shrink the size of my images by 70-80% without a noticeable drop in image quality.
And depending on how many images you need to optimize per month, you might not even need to pay anything to use ShortPixel.
Here’s How ShortPixel WordPress Plugin Helps You Optimize Your Images
ShortPixel is a popular WordPress image compression plugin.
In a nutshell, you configure it on your site and it automatically optimizes the images that you upload on WordPress.
That means you get all the benefits of image optimization without needing to spend any more time than preparing your blog posts.
Beyond that core feature, ShortPixel has a bunch of smaller features that give you more control over how the plugin optimizes your images.
First, ShortPixel has no file size restrictions and works with:
- PNG
- JPG
- GIF
- PDF documents
It can also help you convert PNG to JPG for more size reduction, as well as the option to convert to WebP images for Google Chrome users.
ShortPixel also lets you choose the extent to which you want to compress your images. There are two main types of compression:
- Lossless: No loss in image quality but only a small reduction in file size.
- Lossy: A much larger reduction in file size, but does have a slight impact on image quality, hence the name lossy.
You can also automatically resize the actual dimensions of your images, which saves the effort of manually resizing images before uploading them.
Finally, there are three other features that I think are worth sharing:
- ShortPixel uses an API, therefore the image compression happens on ShortPixel’s servers, which saves you from wasting your own server’s resources.
- The plugin includes a button that lets you bulk optimize all the images in your WordPress media library, which is helpful if you’re adding ShortPixel to an existing blog.
- ShortPixel also lets you compare the compressed version of your image with the original to make sure there’s negligible drop in quality.
I’ll also show you how the plugin actually works and how you can use if to your advantage.
How To Set Up ShortPixel On Your WordPress Site
ShortPixel is a free WordPress plugin listed at WordPress.org. However, because it uses an API to allow your WordPress site to connect to ShortPixel’s servers, the installation process has a few added steps.
How To Configure ShortPixel Settings
Once you add your API key, you should configure a few settings before you start using the plugin.
First, it’s important to choose your Compression type. This lets you tell ShortPixel how aggressively you want it to compress your images. Most of the time, you can use the default Lossy setting.
But if you’re displaying posts where quality is essential (like a photography blog), you might want to choose one of the less aggressive Glossy or Lossless options:
- Also include thumbnails: Tells the plugin whether it should compress image thumbnails as well. This will use up your image quota faster (more on image quotas later). If possible, I recommend that you leave this setting enabled. But if you want to save money, you can consider disabling it.
- Image backup: When you check this box, the plugin will save the original, uncompressed image, as well as the optimized version. I recommend that you leave this setting enabled too, unless you have limited storage space at your host (this shouldn’t be a problem on hosts like Bluehost, which offers unlimited storage)
- Remove the EXIF tag of the image: When checked, the plugin will remove behind-the-scenes metadata from the image. I recommend that you leave this setting turned on.
- Resize large images: This setting lets you automatically resize the actual dimensions of the images that you upload. I recommend that you set it to at least 25% larger than the maximum image width displayed by your theme.
