260 - Image compression for faster websites with EWWW

Interview with Shane Bishop and Nathan Wrigley

So you want your website to be fast. You want your client websites to be fast as well, right? There any many, many different ways that you can go about speeding up your WordPress websites, but perhaps the easiest one of all is to optimise the images that you display to your visitors.

This is going to have a huge impact upon the time it takes for your page to load, and will make Google very happy with you!

Today on the podcast we have Shane Bishop. He know’s a thing or two about optimising images because he’s been doing this for years with his EWWW plugin.

EWWW makes it really easy to create images which don’t have the bloat and are almost indistinguishable from the originals.

If you’re new to all this, you might well think that WordPress handles image optimisation, and whilst that’s a tiny bit true, it really does not do a great job of it. You need a plugin like EWWW to really make a difference. Just because an image looks like it’s the right size in your pages and posts does not mean that it’s optimised. You see, WordPress is displaying an image and then your browser is loading that and then reducing the way it displays to you.

Let’s say that you have a 500 x 500 pixel image on your page, if you view the source, it might well be that you uploaded a 3,000 x 3,000 pixel image to the media library. This is likely that WordPress is displaying on your site. That 2.5 MB image might well only need to be +/- 150 KB.

You can do all of this manually if you like and there are certainly tools out there which will do that for you, but it’s a little bit of a hassle. EWWW will do this for you automatically… at the same time that you upload your images to the server. You upload, EWWW compresses them, you’re done.

The purpose is speed, but it’s also going to make sure that the amount of disk space that you consume is going to be less.

So, in summary, EWWW compresses images which means less bandwidth used and less storage used, which saves you money and makes your site faster. What’s not to like?

We talk about how the plugin came to be, and where the weird name came from, and then get into the weeds of how it all works. Where are images compresses? Is this using your CPU? What kinds of images can it work with? What (new) image formats are recommended these days? Can EWWW compress things other than images? How much does all this cost? Do you have an API?

All this is covered and a whole lot more, so you should check out the podcast and leave a comment either down below or in our Facebook group.

Mentioned in this podcast:

EWWW