WordPress is a fantastic content management platform. It is easy to add and edit content, embed videos and have slide shows of all your images. It is for so much more than just a blog. In this post I will show you how to best manage your images, along with a few helpful tips for a speedier website.

Properly managing your images is important not only to your WordPress website speed but to SEO as well.

Before uploading images to your WordPress web site, it’s important to rename the files. This helps make it easier to organize your images and is fabulous for your SEO bottom line.

Make sure to have your image file names similar to the keywords on your page to help your web site rank higher in search engines.

The two most common image formats are JPEG and PNG. The important thing to understand is which format to use for each image type. Choosing the wrong format can cause a large increase in the size of your image.

Here are the formulas for picking the best format for your images.

PNG format:

Use PNG if you want to have images with blended (fades seamlessly), transparent backgrounds.
Use PNG if you need to create print ready high-resolution graphics.

JPEG Format:

Use JPEG to save photographs.
JPEG cannot have transparent backgrounds.
JPEG does not do a good job at preserving accurate colors – do not use JPEG for logos or text.

When it comes to using lossy versus lossless compression, there is no single, right or wrong answer. It boils down to your choice based on your website’s needs.

The chief difference between JPEG and PNG is the compression formulas that they use. JPG uses a lossy compression process that discards some of the image information in order to reduce the size of the file. While with PNG, image quality will not change, but the size of the file will generally be greater.

Never underestimate the importance of optimizing your website’s images. Optimizing your images will cut down on your website’s page loading times, decrease bandwidth usage and improve your visitors experience while browsing your site. Your search engine ranking should also increase due to your pages loading faster.

Resize Images Before You Upload

One of the easiest ways to optimize images for your website is to resize them before uploading. The major benefit of following this simple method is that you’re able to use a desktop image editing tool (such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP) or an online tool (such as Compressor IO, TinyPNG, PicResize, TinyJPG) which you might already be familiar with. Resizing images before uploading them is ideal for those who do not upload a lot of graphics on a regular basis.

Use A Bulk Image Optimizing Plugin

If you have an image-heavy website and find yourself uploading images all the time, then you might be better off automating the entire image resizing process. And the simplest way to do this is by installing a plugin that will rescale your graphic files automatically when you upload them.

One of my favorite plugins for automating the image optimization process is Compress JPEG & PNG images by TinyPNG. It’s the one I use and I love it. Of course, there are many others that work just as well, such as: WP Smush & EWWW Image Optimizer.