WordPress plugins: Imagify vs Smush vs Shortpixel vs Optimole
Developing and maintaining a website effectively is one of the key elements of a successful business strategy.
Optimizing a website helps in attracting traffic, engaging the viewers and converting them into sales. Optimizing a website includes optimizing the images to ensure they don’t drain the other resources and impact the loading time of the website. This can help to improve the overall SEO of your website.
Today WordPress powers around 34% of the websites in the world. Around 75 million websites are using WordPress. There are four WordPress plugins that help in optimizing your images easily.
It is difficult to choose the best image optimization plugin from these top plugins. Let us try to know more about each plugin to determine which of them is the best image optimization plugin?
Each image optimization tool has its own set of features and advantages, let us compare Imagify vs Smush vs ShortPixel vs Optimole to determine which tool is the best for your website.
1. Imagify:
Imagify is one of the best image optimization plugins for WordPress websites. Imagify is created by the same team which are known for creating the best cache and speed optimization plugin WP Rocket.
The plugin offers a compression level that helps in maintaining the perfect balance between quality and performance. It also helps in optimizing retina images and thumbnails, it is an image optimization plugin that offers all the essential features required for a fast loading site. This plugin requires an API key to enable its functions.
2. Smush:
WP Smush is a popular plugin that helps in optimizing images for the WordPress website. It is created by the team responsible for creating WPMU DEV.
It is the perfect choice for beginners and developers who require an optimization tool that can help develop fast loading websites.
With more than 1 million installations this optimization plugin is easily compatible with other library enhancement plugins that are very useful in adding extra features to a WordPress site.
3. ShortPixel:
ShortPixel is one of the leading image optimizer plugins for WordPress. With more than 200,000 installations, this image optimization plugin offers all the essential features required for optimizing images that help in boosting the loading time of a website.
It is a lightweight plugin, which is perfect for beginners who would not be comfortable to work with complicated procedures.
It boasts of an easy to use interface that helps the user to start working on it immediately after installing it.
4. Optimole:
Optimole plugin is a complete all-in-one solution for WordPress websites created and developed by Themelsle.
It offers excellent features required for optimizing your images, ensuring the top performance of your website. It is a cloud-based plugin that compresses your images to avoid putting a load on your servers.
It optimizes each image quality according to the viewer’s browsers. Optimole offers a hassle-free optimization experience.
Imagify vs Smush vs ShortPixel vs Optimole – Key Features
1. Imagify: Some of the key features of Imagify are:
- Compression features allow compressing of all the existing image files in bulk.
- You have an option to choose the levels of compression – Normal, Aggressive, and Ultra.
- The original full-sized images are stored securely as a backup, which helps in easy restoration in future.
2. Smush: Some of the key features of Smush are:
- Automatic Compression – You can set maximumImagify: Some dimensions for the images to be used on your website and while uploading the plugin will automatically scale down the image as required.
- You can compress your images present in any folder or directory on the website.
- You can optimize images of different formats JPEG, GIF, and PNG one at a time or bulk (up to 50 number of images at once).
- PNGs to JPEGs can be converted automatically. The copies of the full-sized images will remain as a backup.
3. Short Pixel: Some of the key features of Short Pixel are:
- You can compress all your images in bulk with just a single click.
- You can optimize your images that are not available in the media library, like the images added through other plugins.
- Compress images in different formats like JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and PDF files, either in a lossy or lossless format.
- Automatic compression – images can be resized to set dimensions before they are optimized.
4. Optimole: Some of the key features of Optimole are:
- Automatic compression – images can be resized according to the set dimensions before uploading to the website
- It automatically picks the right image size suitable for the viewer’s browser.
- It uses lazy loading for displaying the images without bloating the libraries.
- All the processing is carried out in the cloud.
- Completely compatible with important page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder etc.
- If the website is being loaded on a low-speed internet connection, it automatically downgrades the image quality to be displayed on the website.
Imagify vs Smush vs ShortPixel vs Optimole – Pricing
1. Imagify:
Imagify offers both a free plan and some paid plans. Both versions offer the same set of functionalities. The key difference between the versions is in the number of images that can be optimized.
The free plan allows optimization of 25MB worth of data per month that is approximately 250 images. Whereas the paid version starts at $4.99 per month for 1GB of data that is about 1,000 images.
2. Smush:
WP Smush pro version offers a range of features for simplifying the image optimization task. It offers several customization options.
Access to the pro version requires membership to WPMU DEV. This membership costs $49 per month, however, it comes bundled with several other useful plugins and tools.
3. Short Pixel:
Similar to Imagify, the free version and premium version provide the same functionality. The free version allows optimization of up to 100 images per month whereas by paying only $4.99 you can increase it to 5,000 images per month.
4. Optimole:
The free version of Optimole is all ideal for optimizing images for a WordPress website or blog.
It allows you to optimize 1GB worth of images each month, taking it to around 1000 images per month. The premium plans allow the processing of 10GB of images per month (around 10,000 images).
Imagify vs Smush vs ShortPixel vs Optimole – Performance
1. Imagify:
As per customer ratings on support forums, Imagify has a rating of 4.5 stars. This is a very good performance rating. The reviews and ratings suggest that all the issues or problems faced by the users are resolved by the developers. 20 out of 33 queries posted by users are answered.
Imagify is a good plugin with respect to performance and it provides sufficient technical support. The team is continuously working towards improving its performance and functionality based on the user’s need.
2. Smush:
Smush has an impressive 5-star rating on support forums. On the support forum, 45 out of 52 queries were resolved or answered by the team.
The latest update was 3 weeks back which shows the developers are working on new updates and features to improve the performance of the plugin.
3. Short Pixel:
As per the ratings, Short pixel’s performance is also a 4.5-star rating which is very impressive. On the support forum, 15 out of 37 queries have been answered or resolved, which shows that their team is working towards solving the queries but have not been able to attend to all.
The developers are still working on improving its performance to offer the user a better experience. They are making changes to the website to make it more presentable in order to attract more customers.
There are frequent updates that show that new features are being introduced for better image optimization results. Shortpixel offers amazing performance and is up-to-date.
4. Optimole:
Optimole has a 5-star rating which is absolutely remarkable. Quantitatively its support forum has resolved or answers 18 out of the 23 queries posted by the users.
The developers keep introducing new updates frequently, keeping the plugin up to the mark. They actively try to improve the performance, features, and functionality of Optimole.
Final Words:
Today image optimization plugins are very useful in the development and maintenance of website because of their unique capability to optimize the website and help beautify it at the same time.
Each plugin mentioned above has features that are commendable. All these plugins can help to improve your website performance by optimizing the original images.
Images having the best view and size or colour help make a big difference to the website, so it is important to choose the correct optimization tool for the images which will be featured on the website. Choose the best image optimization plugin depending on the requirements of your website.
