I might not be near my computer to use GIMP, but as long as I have a computer somewhere, I can use PicMonkey. Weird name, but you can use it for free, so why not! As someone who lives online, I need to be able to do a lot of work with online resources. Since this program is not online, I want to share with you how to use the site called PicMonkey. I would recommend this program to anyone. I do have a free program called GIMP installed on my computer. While I have a few programs to resize my images, I find online resources really easy. Image compression plugins are resource intensive as well, so make sure to try out these methods below before jumping into a plugin. While plugins are great, the more you add to your site, the longer it takes your site to load. I’m going to do this all without a plugin. In the spirit of helping others succeed, I’m going to show you how to both resize your images and then compress them before you upload them into WordPress. You really shouldn’t upload anything that is over 100kB. A huge file from a camera can be upwards of 10 to 15 megabytes. These larger images also cause you to reach your hosting disk space limit quicker. The server still has to load that full image. You may only see the image fitting perfectly on your page, but in actuality, it’s just being resized by HTML. The longer load times can cause people to leave your site. One reason you should reduce the size is because it takes a lot of resource to load that image when a page is loading. Most themes don’t use images that large (or any themes), so you should never put them up there like that. These images can be upwards of 3,000 pixels wide and are just massive. I have seen people take images from their cameras and dump them into their media library. The problem comes in when you host huge images. There is no problem with that as that’s how it’s designed. When you run a blog on WordPress, you typically host your images in your media library. Not only am I talking about size (height and width), but also file size.

One issue I see when doing a site audit is images being too big. I certainly don’t mind answering them, so I figured I would take some time to do it today. As someone who manages a lot of blogs and has been blogging for nearly 11 years, I get a lot of questions.

Tinypng plugin