Once you realize that you have to optimize images on your website, it could feel like a daunting task.
It is a lot of hard work if we are going with a manual route.
So, to avoid this manual work, most people look for WordPress plugins that could automatically optimize all the images on the website.
Some good options are Imagify, EWWW, Smush Pro, etc.
But sometimes, these plugins often destroy the quality of the image in the name of compression.
If you notice the image, it is damaged and pixelated because of too much compression.
After all, plugins are not humans when it comes to judging the quality of the images by visually looking at them, right?
They also impact the performance of the website negatively during the time of image compression activity.
They are server-resource intensive in terms of disk space too because they keep a copy of the original image and the compressed image on the server disk.
So, it is better to compress the images manually if you can.
If you can compress images manually:
“Got it, but I have thousands of images, and I can’t compress them manually :(“
I can understand.
If you can’t compress them manually, then go with the image compression plugins but first try using them on a staging site.
This way, you can experiment with various compression settings, and even if images get destroyed, you have nothing to lose.
Fair enough?
“Yep! Yep! but what is a staging site?”
A staging site is nothing but a clone of your live website.
And because it is just a clone, you can perform experiments without worrying about the images or website getting permanently damaged.
