Images play a big part in creating attractive and interesting website pages. However, do you know that these images can give a negative impact on your website performance?

If you upload many image files with big sizes, they can slow down the loading page times of your site. Then, how to fix this problem?

Since you can’t just stop uploading images to your website, it is wiser to optimize your images before uploading them. Many image compressor tools can reduce the size of your images without losing their quality.

In this article, we will review the top 10 best image compressor tools that can help to boost your website SEO ranking.

What is Image Compression Tools?

Image compression is a technology that allows you to reduce image file size. When you compress an image, it adjusts the quality of the image by discarding unnecessary data, for example, limiting the colours used in an image so that there’s less data in the file. However, if you make the image too small, the result will have more obvious pixelation. 

There are 2 types of image compression:

Lossy Compression

Reduce image file size and degrades its quality. Once a file is compressed, you cannot recover the eliminated data. 

Lossless Compression

Reduce image file size but maintain a high-quality image result. It enables you to later restore the file as needed. However, this technique can’t significantly reduce the file size. 

Why should I compress my images?

There are many benefits you get by compressing images for your website purposes. Evidently, compressing images on your site speed up the site loading times by 10% faster than uncompressed one.

To sum up, there are at least 4 benefits you get from compressing images: 

Speed Up your Website

Putting on very high-quality images with large sizes will surely slow down your website to load. On the other side, the smaller the size of the pictures, the faster the site works. 

Therefore, you can use an image compression tool to reduce the size of your content without losing quality and speed up your website loading time. 

Improve your Website SEO Ranking

Search engines including Google prefer fast page loading websites rather than a slow ones. Thus, it impacts the SEO ranking of your website.

This is another reason why you need to optimize your website images by compressing their size. 

Enhance User Engagement

Having a high-performance, a fast-load website is important to attract more people. Evidently, around 53% of people are stopping and leaving the website if the site is loading for more than three seconds according to the study. 

By compressing images, you will get smaller sized images that load faster. 

Boost your Website Conversion

Thanks to the fast loading of your website, more users will visit it and spend more time there. As a result, you will get more potential customers and increased sales. In addition, websites with a good rating on search engines get more customers wishing to purchase their services and products. 

Also read: Tips & Tricks – How to Compress Your Images Without Losing Quality

Top 10 Best Image Compressor Tools

Finding suitable image compression tools can be quite tricky. That’s why we compile the 10 best image compression tools for you. In this list, you will find 3 tool types of images compressor: offline, online, and plugins image compressors. 

Caesium Image Compressor

Caesium Image Compressor is a free, and handy image compression. It can compress almost all general image file formats, including PNG, JPG, JPEG & BMP formats while provides you with the flexibility to set the compression level. 

The best thing about Caesium Image Compression, it has both lossy and lossless compression options. In addition to that, you can use Caesium offline and online in any PC OS, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. It is a very handy compression tool that provides you flexibility for compressing your images. 

Free

Tool: offline & online compressor

For: Windows, Mac, Linux

Pros

• Allow you to set different compression levels.
• Provide the comparison preview of originally uploaded and compressed images.
• Let one recognize the space they’ve saved due to compression.
• Available online and offline for Windows, Mac, Linux. 

Cons

• Many bugs
• Crashes often 

Read more

File Optimizer

File Optimizer is a free compression tool that covers almost any file format. It provides a great lossless (no quality loss) compression result. With a user-friendly interface, you can drag images directly to the application and start compressing as needed. In the column, you can see the original and compressed picture sizes with the relative percentage size of compressed images. It works by sparing metadata and removing other information to decrease the file weight. 

Free

Tool: offline compressor

For: Windows, Linux, Mac

Pros

• Free
• Compress the widest range of file formats
• User-friendly interface
• Various compression levels
• A portable version is available i.e. use the app without installation on PC
• Multilingual interface. 

Cons

• It replaces the original file but it is directed to Recycle Bin which makes it retrievable yet this can be a trouble. 

Read more

ImageOptim

ImageOptim is the best impression tool for Mac users. It provides a free tool that gives a great lossless (no quality loss) image result while reducing the size. Besides supporting quite many formats, it includes compressing JPEG, PNG and GIF files. Also, you can integrate it with other compression tools, like Zopfil, PNGout, JPEGoptim. 

Free

Tool: offline compressor

For: Mac

Pros

• Free
• Without photo quality loss
• Convenient interface

Cons

• Mac only
• A little slow
• It strips down the metadata (Geolocation, EXIF) but you can change it in the Preference setting. 

Read more

Curtail

Curtail (previously ImCompressor) is a free and open-source image compression software for Gnu / Linux. Therefore, it is written with Python and Gtk and designed for GNOME HIG.  It provides lossy and lossless compression for PNG, JPEG, and WEBP images.

Inside the app, you will be provided with some options, such as the possibility of removing metadata from the files, dark themes, progressive encoding JPEG, and compression level settings. In addition, it gives the detail of files name, old size, new size, and how much you saved in percents. 

Free

Tool: offline compression

For: Linux 

Pros

• Free
• Easy to use
• Options for saving images
• Can set the compression level 

Cons

• Linux only
• Installation using flatpack 

Read more

Resizer.app

Resizer.app is a free online image resizer, converter, and optimizer tool. Without downloading the app, you can convert, optimize, crop, and resize JPEG and PNG images online with only one easy click. Also, it is available as a Chrome extension, making it easier to access.

It is free and easy to use, as you only need to open the resizer.app website, upload your image, choose the settings, and apply changes. Then your compressed images are automatically downloaded to your gadget. 

Free

Tool: online compressor

For: all types of PC and mobile phone 

Pros

• Online
• Fast & easy-to-use
• Free & unlimited 
• Many options for image optimization 

Cons

• There is a maximum file size upload 

Read more

Optimizilla

Optimizilla is online lossless image compression. It works by optimizing image formats like JPEG and PNG with the lowest size possible. You can use Optimizilla if you want to compress images quickly and download them one by one or in a zip file as per your choice. 

Free

Tool: online compression (website)

For: all types of PC and mobile phone 

Pros

• Bulk compression (up to 20 pictures)
• Previews of the input and the output after compressing
• Compression level options
• Supports drag & drop 

Cons

• Downloading each file separately 

Read more

TinyPNG

TinyPNG is an image compression tool for JPEG and PNG files. It is available as a website service and WordPress plugin for compressing images. 

As an online compression website, it is simple and fast to use as you just have to select an image and simply drop it onto the page and it will provide you with the link to download that particular compressed image. Besides that, it also can do bulk compression up to 20 images at once. However, TinyPnG limits a maximum 5 MB size for each file. If you want to get a 25 MB of size limit for each file, then you can upgrade to the TinyPNG Web Pro version for a one-year membership. 

As a WordPress compression plugin, it is a very simple and easy-to-use plugin. You can optimize up to half a thousand pictures free every month. In addition, TinyPNG has WooCommerce support. 

Free & Paid

Tool: online compression (website) & WordPress plugin

For: all types of PC and mobile phone 

Pros

• Online & plugin
• Bulk compression (up to 20 images)
• Easy to use
• Provide export to Dropbox options. 

Cons

• No compression level options
• Image size is limited to a maximum of 5 MB only.
• For larger sizes, you require a pro version. 

Read more about TinyPNG Plugin and its website 

WP Smush

WP Smush is a WordPress plugin for image compression and optimization. It compresses images on your server with minimal loss of quality. Firstly, the plugin scans all the images on your website and monitor the future. Then, it easily stripes unnecessary data from the image, compresses them, and even resize them if required.

The supported file formats that work in this plugin include JPG, GIF, and PNG images. It supports files up to 1 MB in size. If you need to optimize larger files, you’ll have to upgrade to WP Smush Pro.

Free & Paid

Tool: Plugin

For: WordPress 

Pros

• Compatible with the Google PageSpeed Insights 
• Provide lossless image compression
• Simple and easy way to optimize images for beginners
• Optimizes 50 images at a time on bulk smush
• Automatically optimize and reduce the size of all new images uploaded

Cons

• The free version has a 1MB file size limit
• Do not give compression level options
• Offers only lossless compression technique on the free version of the plugin.

Read more

ShortPixel Image Optimizer

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is an image compressor tool that offers its service as a WordPress plugin and online image compression.

ShortPixel WordPress image optimizer plugin allows you to choose compression formats. This plugin can compress JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP, and PDF files in a lossy or lossless format. It starts compressing images as soon as you activate the plugin and stores your original images in a separate folder. In addition to that, it is also compatible with WooCommerce, NextGEN Gallery, and the WPML translation plugins. In the free version, it gives you up to 100 images a month for free. Meanwhile, the premium version offers you more.

Besides its plugin, ShortPixel also has an online image compression on their official website. It offers 3 types of compression: Lossy, Glossy, and Lossless. You can drop 50 images at once to do bulk compression.

Free & Paid

Tool: Plugin & Online compression

For: WordPress & any types of PC and mobile phone

Pros

• Excellent free version
• Multiple different compression algorithms
• Affordable paid version
• Automatic compression

Cons

• API key setup required

Read more about ShortPixel Plugin and Online Compression.

EWWW Image Optimizer

EWWW Image Optimizer is a WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes your images as you upload them to your site. This includes image scaling to fit the right size page and device, lazy loading, and even conversion into the next-gen WebP image format. It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside your media library folders. This plugin support JPG, PNG, GIF, and even PDF optimization.

The free version lets you perform image optimizations on your own server. However, you won’t get the image optimization CDN that is only available in the paid version.

Free & Paid

Tool: Plugin

For: WordPress

Pros

• Unlimited file size compression
• Image backup for 30days
• Compresses images that come on 3rd party plugins as well
• CDN supported
• Automatically skips already optimized images

Cons

• The free version of the plugin offers only lossless compression for JPEG images.

Read more

How to choose the right Image Compressor Tools? 

To help you choose the right image compressor tools that are suitable for you, we will compile all details of the top 10 best image compression tools. You need to check which tool meet specific conditions, for instance:

• Compression types: Lossy, Lossless, or both.
• Compression tools: offline (software), online (website), or plugin.
• Compatible for: Windows, Mac, Linux, or WordPress
• Price: Free or Paid (Premium).

Conclusion 

One of the keys to boosting your SEO ranking is compressing your images. If you upload big sized images to your site, it surely will slow down the loading page time. Therefore, to avoid this problem, you should use an image compression tool. There are several image compression tools that you can use, either it is an offline app, an online compressor, or a WordPress plugin. In this article, we are covering the top 10 best compression tools along with their pros and cons.

References 

• 20 Best Image Compression Software Tool Compared – TemplateToaster
• Best Image Optimizer – Fix The Photo
• Which is The Best Image Optimizer for WordPress? – WP all club