How to increase the page speed of your website: a secret weapon WordPress plugin
Sometimes at TLD we like to dive a bit deeper and reveal some of our special secrets.e have very high standards for coding –pixel perfect design, mobile testing, advanced CSS techniques, organised WP integration, SEO schema markup, retina support, website optimisation. All this in addition to testing, image optimisation, formatting and on site SEO means we give your site a lot of attention. So we are constantly looking for ways to save time and make sites more efficient. In case you havent memorised them all, one of our company values is efficiency!
One of the most effective ways to increase page speed and efficiency your website is to optimise images.
It’s important because images take a lot of disk space and can be compressed to save time on loading them. This can be done manually, with certain settings in Photoshop. However, this can be time-consuming.
That depends on what kind of the site that is. If it’s a static HTML page – that can be done with some batch optimizer – AFAIK, Photoshop has this feature. If it’s a WordPress site, a plugin called “Kraken! is best, but WordPress itself has a setting to increase the compression ratio.
Each image in your site would need to be opened up and saved out again, at the correct size, with certain settings to make sure there is no visible loss of quality, but the file size is greatly reduced.
Google PageSpeed has a feature to download compressed images in an archive. It is useful if you have a static HTML website.
The file type may need to change too (for example some images that are gifs or jpegs should be PNGs, and vice versa). If you don’t use transparency, than JPEG is good. If you don’t have many colours in the image – PNG is better (e.g. diagram). GIF’s are now primary used for gif animations
A plugin called Kraken.
You can find it at Kraken.io and it will work only for WordPress sites. There is a free option where you can compress 100MB per month of images for free, so for small websites it should be enough. If you have something with a lot of images in galleries, like an interior design site or a photography blog you will easily reach the limit.
Our coders feel there are no better alternatives yet, everyone likes it, it’s smooth, fast and reliable. Other plugins are too complicated and they are not able to do the job correctly – when you check Google Speed other plugins fail to compress images enough.
Using Kraken saves a lot of time.
What it does is just adds a button in the media library and you just click on it – easy. Then the image and its thumbnails are sent to Kraken server, processed and sent back. It can do images in batches which makes life even easier!
There are settings available for compress ratio. I noticed it has some extra abilities and compresses images even more that you expect – which is good for all. Note: compression will add some noise to the image so you’ll have to test a few settings before you do great big batch.