The speed of a website, and with it, technical SEO, is more important than ever. Fast websites will rank slightly higher in the search results compared to slow websites. A fast loading time is also essential for user-friendliness. Think about it for yourself: how much patience do you have when waiting for a website to load? A slow website will lose visitors and negatively affect your SEO results.
But which factors determine this loading time exactly? Various factors, but the images on a website, play a major role. Research by Akamai shows that on average, about 65% of a page’s file size comes from its images. The WordPress SEO plugin Imagify reduces the file size without compromising quality. In this Imagify blog, we will tell you exactly how the plugin works and how to use it.
Let’s start with the costs of Imagify, so you know where you stand. The Starter subscription is free and allows you to optimize up to 20 MB per month. Want to optimize more images? Then there are three other choices:
The Growth and Infinite subscriptions are both cheaper on an annual basis. But if you aren’t completely convinced yet, a monthly subscription might be more suitable. You can cancel it every month if it does not prove to be of value for your website. In the image below, you can see the prices and contents of the different subscriptions on an annual basis. Do you have a special request? Please contact the Imagify team to discuss the possibilities.
Try Imagify easily and for free online. Upload images up to 2 MB with a free Imagify account and optimize them directly on the Imagify website.
Imagify is a WordPress plugin and straightforward to download. You can find the plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. You can also find it via the search function in your dashboard. First log in to your WordPress dashboard. From there, click Plugins and select New plugin. Manually search for Imagify and click: Install Now. Once it is installed, activate it. You will have added the plugin to your WordPress in no time. You can see how this works in the image below.
After activating the plugin, you will immediately see a change on your dashboard. You will see a roadmap for starting to use Imagify.
As soon as you enter your e-mail address in step 1, you will receive an e-mail with the API Key. You can also create an account, so you can easily log in to your Imagify account. After you have entered your API Key in the dashboard in step 2, you can go to settings in step 3.
In step 3, you customize the settings exactly as you want them. First, choose the optimization level you want. There are three possibilities:
After that, you choose whether you want to optimize all the images you upload to WordPress automatically. You also have to decide whether you wish to make a backup of your original images before the optimization process starts. The last thing you do is choose whether you want to save the EXIF data of your images.
If you then scroll down, you will come across a few more settings. First, you can choose to create WebP (tip!) files from the images on your website. Then you can choose to resize your images to a maximum number of pixels. Imagify already gives a recommendation for the size. Finally, you choose which images you want to optimize. You can see exactly what this looks like in the image below.
We recommend that you also add your theme for optimization. You can do this by clicking the “ADD THE THEME TO OPTIMIZATION” button and then selecting the theme you are using. Once you have changed your preferences, save your changes.
Now that you have adjusted all the settings to your preferences, it’s time to start using Imagify. If you have chosen to optimize all your images to be uploaded in the future, this will save you some work. Note that the images you uploaded in the past still need to be optimized. Fortunately, Imagify has designed Bulk Optimization for this purpose. It optimizes all images on your website. The image below shows where to find this setting.
Imagify is developed by its parent company WP Media, which in addition to the Imagify plugin is also the developer of WP Rocket. Because of this, Imagify includes an integration with WP Rocket, where WP Rocket takes care of caching and lazy loading of the optimized images.
The user-friendliness of Imagify makes it suitable for anyone who would like to increase the loading time of a website. The steps you need to take are clear and don’t take long. In addition, you don’t waste valuable time because all the images you have uploaded in the past can be optimized at once thanks to the Bulk Optimization.
The disadvantage of the plugin is that you have to pay if you want to optimize more than 20 MB per month. It is definitely recommended to optimize the images on your website, since the loading time of your website has a big an influence on your Google rankings.
Jarik, an accomplished SEO consultant and founder of SmartRanking, brings over 12 years of SEO experience to the table. With his team of SEO specialists, he assists companies of all sizes in enhancing their online visibility. His areas of expertise include strategy development, analysis, technical SEO, and migrations.
His extensive experience spans B2B SEO, enterprise SEO, programmatic SEO, and e-commerce SEO. He holds a degree in Informational Science from the University of Groningen, where he focused on Natural Language Processing. His goal is to provide insights and knowledge to guide businesses toward success in the ever-evolving world of SEO.