Images make your website look good but if your images are not optimized for web usage, it may impact the performance of your website badly, especially it will lose its speed. There are several WordPress Plugins for Images available to process and optimize images. Image compression is needed quite frequently and Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin is one of the best WordPress plugins for Image Compression. Major features of this plugin are :

• It is developed by the WordPress team itself at WPMU Dev, so its reliability is unquestionable.
• It strips the unused data without affecting the image quality.
• Bulk compress the already uploaded images on the website at once. It can compress up to 50 images at once.
•  Automatically optimize the images while you upload them. This optimization runs in the background to speed up your work, you don’t need to wait for the compression of an image to be completed before uploading the new image.
• The best part is it is completely free and you can compress unlimited images with it.
• It can automatically detect images with incorrect sizes which are impacting your site’s performance.
• It is compatible with Woocommerce, WPML, WP Retina 2X, WP Offload S3 etc.
• The image size it can handle is limited to 1 MB.

How To Install Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin:

To install this plugin we can follow either of the following 3 methods based on your preference:

1. Install from Admin Panel – Install it from the admin panel in the following steps:
   • Login to the admin panel
   • Go to the plugins section
   • Click Add New
   • Search for Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin
   • Click the install button
   • Now click the Activate, done
2. Install from FTP Account – Install it from the FTP account in the following steps:
   • Download the plugin files from here. It will come in zip format
   • Login to the FTP account using FileZilla or any other FTP client
   • Go to public_html -> wp-content -> plugins
   • Upload the plugins zip file into this folder
   • Extract the zip
   • Now go to the admin panel and you will see it in the installed plugins list
   • Search for Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin
   • Activate the plugin
3. Install from cPanel – Install it from the cPanel in the following steps:
   • Download the plugin files from here. It will come in zip format
   • Login to the cPanel
   • Open File Manager
   • Go to public_html -> wp-content -> plugins
   • Upload the plugins zip file into this folder
   • Extract the zip
   • Now go to the admin panel and you will see it in the installed plugins list
   • Search for Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin
   • Activate the plugin

How To Use Smush Image Compression & Optimization Plugin:

Before starting to use it let’s have a look at the limitation of this plugin:

1. You can compress unlimited images with this plugin.
2. The only limitation is that the size of the image shouldn’t be more than 1 MB
3. To remove this limit, you have to go for its premium version.

After activating this plugin you have to set it up as shown in the following video:

Once the setup is complete you can start using it in any of the 2 ways : 

1. Start uploading new images and let this plugin compress them for you automatically.
2. If there are already uploaded images in the media library, you can go to Media – >Bulk Optimization and compress all the images at once.