The Best Image Compression Techniques for WordPress

OMG I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while, and this is my set of conclusion:

1. For all the images you’ve already been using on your WordPress website, installing ShortPixel is the cheapest and easiest means to do it. I never refer services but in this case I’m more than happy to do so — and I’ve already paid in bulk for 50k of credits because I’ve found it SO worth the convenience. FYI I set my maximum size to 1200 by 1200 when I did the bulk compression step.
2. For all the images you are about to upload to your WordPress website, upload them in webp format. On OS X the free utility to use is webponize — which didn’t work for me so I installed the command line tools from google. You’ll need to enable webp format upload with this plugin. If you don’t like webp, then the free utility ImageOptim is the best option I have found out there.

Note that when you’ve setup ShortPixel that your WordPress media library will automatically compress any new image that you upload. So there’s no reason to use webponize or ImageOptim unless you want to be a control fanatic — which I totally get. —JM

Other methods include using this free WebP Express plugin that does some automagic with your image files that takes some incremental compute time in the background but can lend to a speedup for your existing images. And I looked a bunch into Cloudinary and Imagekit, but I’m a little tired of paying for cloud services all over the place.