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Hence a plugin has to be seen in its totality and not just in terms of its raw image compression capabilities. This helps to minimize the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), a Core Web Vital metric.įinally, converting images to the WebP format further reduces the image size and serves them in the most compatible format for modern browsers like Google Chrome. Lazyload ensures that the image is visible only when it’s in the viewport of the user to conserve bandwidth and speed up the page load.īy specifying the image dimensions beforehand, the browser reserves the exact space required to display the image. Image compression is self-explanatory and the most obvious function but the other 3 are no less important. There are 4 tasks expected of a robust image optimization plugin: compression, lazyload, specifying image dimensions, and WebP conversion. To make your search easier, I have compared the 10 most popular WordPress image optimization plugins available right now. There are multiple WordPress image optimization and compression plugins available for the job and it’s easy to feel confused while trying to pick the right image compression plugin for your website. And people who say they can't notice any difference are either using images with little color information OR they just aren't really paying attention.Images usually account for the bulk of the page size so optimizing images by compressing them is a crucial step to make your website pages load faster. So really, this is no big deal is what I'm trying to say. The left is the original image (full original found here used without permission), and the right is the TinyPNG version. You can see this clearly in the image i've created here. This means your resulting image has the same color depth available to a GIF, thus removing one of the primary benefits of using PNG in the first place (the other main benefit being a true alpha channel).
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What's happening here is this tool simply just reduces the color depth from 24bpp to 8bpp, with dithering applied. In other words, this isn't lossy compression in the way that JPEG does lossy compression. This tool does not apply "lossy compression" the way the term is usually applied. There's a lot of misinformation about this tool and quite frankly I'm surprised people are this impressed with what appears to me to be a quite mundane operation.
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