image optimising

  • Unknown's avatar
    timburkinshaw · Member ·

    I have a free WP website used as a blog. Not commercial, not a business. Concerned about carbon footprint (per https://www.websitecarbon.com/ which ranks it among worst 5% which is alarming as an ecologist!)
    What can I do to reduce this…. eg is there a free / easy plugin that optimises images? ShortPixel has been mentioned but needs a WP business plan I think?
    I’m not techie in any way, so I need something easy.

    WP.com: Yes
    Correct account: Yes

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    thomasjvu · Member ·

    Hi there!

    Your commitment to reducing your website’s carbon footprint is admirable.

    To answer your question, free WP websites are unfortunately unable to install plugins, and you would need to either upgrade to the Business plan or self-host your WordPress if you wanted to install plugins.

    I believe that the WP Personal plan comes with some of Jetpack’s essential features, which may include image optimization.

    If you wanted to do this for completely free, I believe you may need to optimize your images manually. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to do so!

    Here’s an article that details how one can manually optimize their images using free software such as GIMP and ImageOptim: https://wordpress.com/support/media/image-optimization/

    I hope that this helps!

  • Unknown's avatar
    justjennifer · Member ·

    Hi there, I hope you don’t mind me adding some suggestions.

    Regardless of plan, the one thing you can do to significantly increase your site loading time is resize and optimize your images before you upload them to your site.

    In your theme, Yoko (retired), the max width of the single post content column is 820 pixels, so uploading images that are 3648 pixels wide and with a file size of 2.58MB not only slows down loading time, but it also eats up your available storage space.

    If you want your visitors to see a larger version of your image, then upload resized images at 1600 pixels wide, but try to keep the file size under 250KB or as small as possible. The only reason to upload images larger than that is if you’re inviting your visitors to download and print them.

    For images that are already uploaded, you’d need to optimize the image offline and then replace each one already on your site. For that, any image editing software that does batch editing would be your best choice, but replacing and deleting previous images unfortunately can’t be automated.

    Hope that also helps.

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