If you haven’t heard of the Smush Plugin in WordPress, this is a great tool for speeding up the site for you. It works as an image compression plugin and having the ability to compress images is a key component to making your site run faster. Obviously pages with many bulky, large images load slowly which is a huge problem for your bounce rate. 

Your search ranking is based on things like your site’s speed and mobile-friendliness so it’s of utter importance that you take every precaution to avoid errors like content that doesn’t load properly on phones or sites that load too slowly for users with limited time in their day to look at your blog. When you’re ready to make changes to increase your site for users, start with the <a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/">WP Smush Plugin</a> to start with improving your speed. 

<h2>How does it work?</h2>

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The image compression plugin works by minimizing redundancy and irrelevancy of an image’s data that wouldn’t really be perceptible to the human eye anyhow. You can store and convey your images much more efficiently just by simply taking advantage of this plugin. In addition, the plugin will work to reduce image sizes so that there is a balance between the highest image quality possible with the lowest possible file size. 

Image compression can take place through an algorithm of many varieties. The simplest one would be the run-length encoding which analyzes every image “bit” to locate a pattern. 

<h2>Why should I use image compression?</h2>

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It’s so important to have image compression because it can affect your mobile users, your conversion rates, your search engine rankings, and of course, your speed.  Websites tend to be too slow without it which affects people’s opinion of your site and their ability to access it on mobile. Your conversion rate is then affected and having a site without mobile ability or a fast speed will put you lower on Google’s search engine rankings system. 

<h2>Lossless and Lossy Compression</h2>

You may have heard these terms used in previous attempts at image compression tools but you may not know the difference. Lossless compression refers to the type of image compression in which every single bit of the image can be recovered after a file is uncompressed like a PNG. 

WP Smush offers several ways to take out every last byte from an image for the best possible lossless compression. A Loss compressions is going to work to permanently remove the data during compression which means that decompression will only restore part of the data. JPEG files typically use lossy compression.   

The differences between JPEGs, PNGs, and another option of GIFs, are:
<ul>
<li>GIFs have small file sizes, a limited color palette, and support transparency mode, and their lossless compression doesn’t allow for much optimization</li>
<li>PNGs have excellent image quality, full transparency support, and they provide lossless compression</li>
<li>JPEGs display photographic images in a large range of colors and can go under heavy optimization due to lossy compression</li>
</ul>
<h2>How Smush is going to improve site time</h2>

When you decide to get WP Smush, your site speed can improve due to its powerful functionality. Your image quality can be maintained in the process. There are a few ways that it will improve your site speed between the automated smushing, lossless compression, and bulk smushing. Through the automated route, you don’t have to know how to optimize an image because the smushing will happen for you with just a few clicks. 

The plugin also has an advanced lossless compression technique to produce amazing results without compromising quality which can be done while you back up the originals. Bulk smushing comes in handy when you have several images stored on the server that are uncompressed because you can upload them in batches of 50 at a time to compress them. 

<h2>The regular plugin vs. the premium</h2>

<img src="https://itxdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/WPSmushPro.png" alt="WP Smush Pro" width="408" height="283" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-9303" />

Choose between this regular plugin option or go for WP Smush Pro for a premium experience. The Pro version offers features like:
<ul>
<li>Smushing up to 32MB instead of just 1MB on the regular plugin</li>
<li>Double the compression with the multi-pass lossy compression giving you 2 – 10 times more compression than lossless</li>
<li>Bulk smushing in one click if you have way more than 50 images in your library to compress</li>
<li>Backup of all the smushed images for you </li>
</ul>
You’ll love this handy WordPress plugin for increasing your site speed and maintaining the beauty of your images. Check out the regular and pro versions of the plugin. 
