You can see straight away that the original, resized image filesize is 755.74 KiB and the compressed image has been massively reduced down to 38.35 KiB. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be taken back to the compression screen which shows the before and after compression for the image.

This will then take you to the screen where you can enter the desired dimensions. If the image is a large one, you’ll get a notice like this asking you if you want to resize it, in most cases the answer is going to be ‘yes’. Now all you need to do is drag and drop the image into the first box that you want to optimise. I personally have the mode set to manual as I prefer to keep the original file format, but you can try the automatic mode if you prefer. Once you’ve downloaded the program and opened it up, you’ll see something like this. Oh, and it has a handy batch compression tool which compresses an entire folder full of images in one go, useful when your images just need to be reduced for filesize.Īnd did I mention RIOT is completely free to download? I do use Photoshop and Illustrator on the occasion I need to make a background transparent or some other refinement to an image, but for changing dimension size, stripping metadata and compressing file size, RIOT can do it all in less than a minute. I’m talking about a free Windows tool I use to optimise images called RIOT – Radical Image Optimization Tool. Ok, I hear ya, enough of the puns already! If you have the time, I urge you to optimise and re-upload all images on your website for best results, but when time is short a plugin can make a positive difference.

The good news is that it is possible to quickly and easily optimise your images before you upload them to WordPress which is what I recommend, but there are plugins that will do some optimisation for those already uploaded. Each 600kb image puts more strain on the server but if you can compress them down to under 100kb, you’ll reduce those page loading times. Images can drastically slow down a website, particularly if you’ve uploaded a 1920 x 1280 image but you want it displaying as 400 x 300 – your website has to do some work to make that happen which increases server response times. Image optimisation is one of the essential tasks for improving website functionality and search engine optimisation.

Image compression software for websites