WordPress Plugin Review: Optimus Image Compressor

 

Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a web page and also often occupy a significant amount of visual space.

As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements for your website: the fewer bytes the browser has to download, the less competition there is for the client’s bandwidth and the faster the browser can download and render useful content on the screen. Optimized images will speed up website and improve rank.  Google likes optimized websites.

There are many wordpress plugins and API available for lossless image optimization. Some of them are very good in quality and Optimus is one of the best.

Optimus Image Optimizer

Optimus is a image compression solution from KeyCDN. Optimus is fresh on the market and it is quickly become one of the most popular image optimizer. Images can be reduced up to 70% and you won’t lose any quality of images. Optimus wordpress plugin is quick and doesn’t take alot of server resources. In quick comparison Optimus vs. Kraken, Optimus is two times quicker, has lower impact on server and is cheaper by 50%.

How does it work?

During the uploading process of images to the media library, the Optimus plugin simultaneously sends the images to the Optimus server, where the incoming material is processed and sent back in optimized form. Afterwards, the Optimus plugin saves the image version with a reduced file size in the media library.

The optimization of images – including thumbnails – is done in the background. The compression gains per file are displayed in the media library as a percentage.

Optimus uses lossless optimization and never alters the quality of images. Instead, superfluous information that is saved by image processing programs and is not even necessary for displaying the image is extracted from image files. This way, the quality of the graphics remains intact while the image size can be reduced significantly. Optimus can keep all author, EXIF and copyright information contained within the photos if you opt out in settings but the compression will be lower.

Features

• Progressive JPEGs
• Reduction of file size without loss in quality
• Optimization of all preview images of a photo
• No adjustments to code necessary
• Optional: no removal of EXIF and IPTC metadata
• Optional: HTTPS connection for the image transfer (Optimus HQ)
• Optional: conversion to the WebP image format (Optimus HQ)
• Optional: Disable automatic optimizaion during upload process
• Optimized for WordPress Mobile Apps and Windows Live Writer
• More advantageous PageSpeed, influencing the Ranking Factor
• Faster load times for blog pages
• Support for WooCommerce
• WordPress multisite-support
• Bulk optimization (optimize existing images)

Price and Plans

Optimus has free or paid plans. All plans have unlimited image compressions, but free plan has one big limitation and that is maximum file size which is 100KB. With paid plan you get https connection, developer API, WebP conversion and max file size is goes to 5MB (in most cases is more than enough). Paid plan will cost you only $29 per year, cheapest plan at Kraken is $60.