As we all know, images are an integral part of our WordPress websites, allowing us to present our services and products easily to visitors and optimising customer engagement. The problem is that too many of us upload very large images, too large for what we really need on our websites, resulting in longer loading times and eating into our server resources.
The solution is to optimise and manage these images, so that our WordPress websites load faster, encouraging visitors to remain on our websites for longer and ultimately increasing traffic, sales and conversions.
To this end, here are 4 plugins that will help you to manage your images on your WordPress websites.
- Imsanity: This is a free plugin that resizes large images that you have already uploaded and reduces each of them to a size that is more manageable by your customer’s browser. It will also resize any images you upload in the future, freeing up disk space otherwise taken up by overly large images.
- Force Regenerate Thumbnails: When you resize thumbnail images to optimise them, instead of keeping all of the unused sizes you no longer need, this free plugin removes these old images, freeing up essential disk space. It is also great for resizing thumbnails when you change themes.
- Enhanced Media Library: If you upload a lot of media files, then this free plugin will help you to categorise and manage them all in one go. It saves you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend rummaging through all of your uploaded media files, trying to find an image, amongst thousands, that you previously uploaded two years ago (for example).
- Jetpack Photon: This is an add-on to Jetpack, which is also a free plugin for WordPress sites. Photon is an image accelerator and editing service. It makes sure that your images fit your theme by resizing them on the fly. This is a CDN just for images, making loading images much faster on your customer’s browsers.
Just adding these 4 plugins will make managing your WordPress multimedia files so much easier with faster loading times and less drain on your server’s resources.
To discuss your WordPress needs to contact a professional website designer, call us at GO Creative on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free quote online.
