One of the most important elements in every article is the presence of image. If you have a very long article, you may consider putting few more images at the middle and bottom of the article to keep them focus to read till the very last sentence the article.
Optimizing every image you use is important as it can affect you site loading speed. We all know that a very good loading speed is vital for your SEO.
WP Smush.it
If you’re using a WordPress, WP Smush.it is a plugin you definitely want to use. This plugin is now maintained by WPMU Dev team, so it should be always in good shape. The plugin follows the recommendations from Yahoo to optimize the image in several ways:
- stripping meta data from JPEGs
- optimizing JPEG compression
- converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
- stripping the un-used colours from indexed images
The plugin works in background. Every image uploaded to post or page will be optimized automatically.
Moreover, if you just installed the plugin, you will be able to optimize all images you’ve previously uploaded to your site in bulk. What a great feature!
TinyPNG
TinyPNG isn’t a WordPress plugin but it deserve to be mentioned here. TinyPNG is a great web application to optimize your PNG image.
TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!
This is a really great tool. On average, the tool compress my image up to 80% in size!
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