I can’t stress enough that on a WordPress privately hosted site, you cannot simply upload photos that aren’t properly resized for faster loading.
Unlike social media and other platforms, there is no automatic resizing/compressing unless you use a plugin (which is absolutely not the solution if you are paying for server space). And face it, most of us need to at least crop or improve it in some way before you post anyway.
While this article is important for bloggers who heavily rely on images in their posts, basic understanding and following a few extra steps will help you in the long run.
Uploading oversized images will cause your site to load much slower, it can affect SEO and it will cost you more in the long run as there is no greater way to waste your server space than to upload huge images (well, okay… those of you who use my webmail services and never delete any mail). In fact, with my clients, the most common reason that someone hits the limits of their hosting space is many many uncompressed images that have duplicates (they aren’t even aware of) on the server that are auto-generated by WordPress.
What many people don’t know is that WordPress natively takes an uploaded photo and makes many copies which simply compounds the issue. I have a tutorial coming that will show how to use ThumbPress plugin to disable copies of images when they are uploaded.
Warning: plugins that ‘optimize’ photos upon upload do not save you server space (and don’t even do as well as you would imagine). When you upload an unoptimized image, the ‘optimize’ plugin (SmushIt, etc.) will make multiple copies of it and store them on the server just to show that one. and that is in addition to the original.
And while I very highly recommend Photoshop Elements ($99 and the software has a 3 yr. license) will edit, crop and compress, it does not natively export to .webp. Luckily there are free services like ImageResizer.com that you can upload and export to .webp for free.
Rule of thumb, your images should be UNDER 100 kilobytes (KB’s). Chances are your camera is taking a high resolution photo and it will be many megabytes (MB). For example, the average size of a photo on my camera (set to high resolution) is 7 megabytes. And for reference, 1 MB = 1000 KB which is very large.
Images you create with services like Canva may generate images with even higher files sizes and it doesn’t compress as well as it could.
Some file types (example .png) that are natively larger. You should not be creating/exporting images as .png unless you need the transparency. And then you can upload it to ImageResizer.com and export it to .webp and it will preserve the transparency.
Check out the video below…