Imagify Review: How to Optimize WordPress Images

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You’ve come to the right page if you’re looking for a completely hands-free solution to optimize WordPress images for maximum compression, resizing, and speed.

Images undoubtedly bring beauty and improve engagement and life to your WordPress post. But they can quickly increase your blog size and slow down the pagespeed if not correctly optimized for the web.

And this can have a HUGE negative impact on your page speed score, which might not be suitable for SEO and user experience.

In this Imagify review, I will show you how to optimize WordPress images for faster loading without quality loss. It is an automatic WordPress image optimization plugin that handles all the heavy lifting.

So you can focus more on other essential tasks such as content creation, site security, and marketing.

Why WordPress Image Optimization Plugin?

With an image optimization WordPress plugin like Imagify, you don’t have to tweak anything. It’s a matter of uploading your images and forgetting everything else.

It saves you time, and images are auto-optimized upon upload to your WordPress blog. Plus, they’re optimized-ready whenever you need the images in your post.

Optimization, image resizing, and compression are done with one powerful image optimization plugin.

Whatever your media file type extension, JPEGs, PNGs, PDFs, GIFs, etc… the best image optimizer WordPress plugin will compress and optimize the images for faster loading.

The WordPress image optimization plugin we will use for our study is Imagify. The Imagify plugin is brought to you by Wp Media, the team that gave you WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is the number 1 cache plugin for millions of WordPress websites. You can check out my review of it here.

So expect nothing less than WordPress performance at its best.

Let’s dive into the Imagify review…

How to Optimize WordPress Images With Imagify

Before we go on to today’s Imagify review, there is something significant to note here…

As a tradition I follow strictly on this blog, I try as much as possible to test-drive a product before writing a review about it.

This allows for accuracy, unbiased review, authenticity, first-hand user experience, and above all, gives my audience a complete view of the product or services.

To this end, I tested the Imagify WordPress image optimization plugin. I wanted to see how effective and the impact it will bring to page speed in real time.

So I handpicked a post on this blog with 12 images in it. These are already optimized images with Jet Pack Site Accelerator feature.

I run a page speed test for the post with GtMetrix before using the Imagify plugin to optimize this post’s images further.

Here is the before screenshot speed test with GtMetrix…

As you can see in the GtMetrix page speed report above, the exact page fully loaded time is 1.9 seconds.

In online marketing, especially in the eCommerce industry, every second, every mile, seconds count. This is why you need to continue looking for ways to optimize your WordPress pages better.

According to Google/Deloitte, improving page speed by just 0.1s can lead to an 8% increase in conversion. This is one of the reasons you shouldn’t stop at it and continue looking for ways to improve page speed.

So after optimizing the images within the post with the Imagify plugin, I reduced the page’s fully loaded time by 1 second.

One second might not look like a lot to you at the moment. But think about it this way…

Getting 50% of your WordPress posts/pages down by one second could greatly reduce overall page speed time.

Just think about it…

How to Set up Imagify Your Account

Imagify offers both an online image optimization tool and the installation of an in-house WordPress plugin.

So if you don’t want to install another WordPress plugin, you can use the Imagify online website for all your image optimization process.

Either way, you need an account to use Imagify for all your image optimization.

So to set up your account, visit the Imagify website and sign up using your email address and name. No credit card is required. It’s free.

Unless your website uses many images, the free Imagify account with a 25MB monthly plan is enough for most content websites.

But if you require more monthly quota, check out the paid plans down the post.

Online Image Optimization With Imagify

For some reason, you may prefer the Imagify online image optimization tool.

This is especially useful for a quick page-level image optimization process. And for other image optimization purposes.

Visit this link to create an Imagify login or signup page account.

Imagify provides two optimization methods in online tools.

You can either upload images from your computer or paste them into the URL of a web page containing the images you want to optimize.

There are a few settings on the page you may need to consider.

Keep Exifs – If you’re a photographer, you may want to keep the image info like shutter speed, ISO, etc. Therefore, this feature becomes useful; otherwise, leave it as it is.

Auto Convert PNG to JPEG – This is self-explanatory. Check the box to have your PNG images convert to JPEG upon optimization automatically.

Resize Images – You can do so here if your project requires specific image sizes. It gives the option to specify values in pixels or percentages.

After the optimization, you can download the optimized images to your computer within 24 hours.

On the free Imagify online account, optimized images are available for download 24 hours and have a 5MB upload limit.

Like its WordPress plugin, Imagify provides three optimization levels in the online mode. You will read about the differences in the optimization level in the section below.

Image Optimization With Imagify Plugin

If you choose to have your images optimized within your WordPress blog, you need to install and activate the Imagify image optimization plugin.

Like any other WordPress plugin, use the “add new” plugin feature in your WordPress admin menu to start.

Type Imagify in the search bar. The result should return this plugin…

Install and activate the Imagify plugin, and you’re three steps away from running Imagify on your blog. Next, follow the on-screen three steps and instructions to get started.

You must create an account on the Imagify website, get your API, and configure the plugin.

Once you’ve created your account, you get your API from the website.

Besides your account profile picture, a drop-down menu icon reveals account API, billing, and other related menu settings.

Get your account API from the open page, and paste it into the API field on the Imagify setting page on your WordPress blog.

Once you’ve entered your account API in the field above and clicked the “save changes” button, it will take you to the Imagify settings page.

Here you can do many things to optimize your images for the web. And make your WordPress blog blazing faster.

Imagify provides three (3) image optimization levels to choose from:

• Normal – Image optimization without any visible changes. Lossless compression optimization.
• Aggressive – Significant reduction in image size with unnoticeable image quality loss.
• Ultra – A little image quality loss but the highest reduction in image sizes.

If you’re unsure which optimization level you need, use the “Try the Visual Comparison” button, as shown in the image above.

It will take you to the test page like the one here…

Here you can see how your images will look at each optimization level. You can return to the settings page to continue with the image setting options.

There are other optimization options you may want to check out. On the setting page, you can choose to auto-optimize images upon upload.

I highly recommend you enable this option.

This is one of the core benefits of using an automatic image optimization plugin.

Next, you can back up your original images in a separate folder before the optimization begins.

I don’t see why you may want to enable this option.

Optimize Image in WebP Format

The Imagify plugin allows you to serve your images in the WebP format for supported browsers.

WebP is the modern-day image file format that provides excellent lossless and lossy image compression for web browsers.

WebP lossless image format is 26% smaller than PNG for supported users’ browsers. At the same time, WebP lossy image format is 25-34% smaller than JPEG format.

Imagify allows you to serve your images in this format if the user browser supports it.

Bulk Image Compression And Optimization

The bulk optimization feature becomes useful if you run the Imagify plugin for the first time and have many unoptimized images.

This feature lets you launch bulk image optimization at a go. Based on your image sizes, the optimization time will vary.

Don’t close the browser tab once the bulk optimization is in progress; otherwise, the optimization process will terminate.

From your WordPress admin area, hover on “Media” from the side menu and click “Bulk Optimization.”

Here you can launch the bulk optimizer and, with one click, optimize all the media files in your library.

Media Library and Custom Folder

Imagify auto-detects your blog theme and asks if you want to optimize it.

This is a good feature in the image optimization plugin not commonly found in other related plugins.

If you love to add the blog theme to optimization, click on the “Add The Themes to Optimization” button, and you’re done.

And you can also use its media library feature to optimize large images to specific maximum pixel width.

Imagify Pricing

The plugin comes with a free plan that may be suitable for a content website. A website does not make use of a lot of images in its posts.

But for a blog like a photographer, travel, eCommerce, etc…that uploads many images, the paid Imagify plans might be a perfect option.

The Imagify plugin comes in five different paid plans. You can choose between monthly/yearly or one-time plans depending on your image size and needs.

The one-time plans allow you to run an optimization for bulk images. You only pay once and use it as you like.

You can check out the full Imagify plugin pricing table on this page.

Pros and Cons of Imagify Plugin

Imagify + WP Rocket

Combining the two (2) plugins will give users the best of your website experience if you want complete toolkits for your WordPress page speed optimization.

The Imagify plugin helps optimize, resize, and compress images so your WordPress images are reduced in size and weight to the barest minimum without quality loss.

While WP Rocket brings the best caching system and file optimization to your WordPress blog.

WP Rocket also delays off-screen images to load only when visible in the user browser. Additionally, the plugin work on iframe and YouTube videos. It loads a preview image instead of the actual video itself.

In practice, this will reduce the request of the HTTP mechanism and significantly improve page speed.

Conclusion…Optimize WordPress Images – Imagify Review

From experience, the Imagify plugin is one of the few WordPress image optimization plugins that truly make the job easier.

I have tested many image compression and optimization plugins. While a few plugins stand above Imagify in quality, they’re not freemium, which makes them only available on paid plans.

If you’re looking for a freemium image optimization plugin with features that rival paid plans, try Imagify.