Optimizing WordPress Images with PressThumb

Serving optimized images from your WordPress sites is an important part of making your site as fast and accessible to your visitors. Not only does it make your load faster, but it also saves precious bandwidth and storage that can eventually get out of control.

In a perfect world, everyone would always upload pre-optimized images to their WordPress sites. Of course, that's usually not the case for most sites. This is especially true for sites that serve user-submitted images that may not have been edited at all.

What Is PressThumb?

PressThumb is Pagely's image processor that will allow you to automatically generate and serve optimized images on the fly. By appending the requested file name with additional parameters such as the image dimensions, PressThumb will modify generate an optimized copy of the image and serve it directly to the visitor, without any additional user intervention.

Since these optimized images are generated automatically, there's no need to make any changes ahead of time and you'll no longer need to maintain multiple image sizes when uploading new files!

PressThumb vs. Image Optimization Plugins

The main difference between PressThumb and various image optimization plugins such as EWWW Image Optimizer is that PressThumb doesn't require additional PHP processes or storage space to optimize, resize, or convert your images.

Since images are generated on the fly, you also won't need to convert the image ahead of time, leading to much less work if you decide that you need additional image sizes or formats.

Using PressThumb For WordPress Image Optimization

 If you'd like to use PressThumb to optimize your WordPress images, simply contact our support team to have it enabled for you. We'll be happy to create a configuration that best suits your needs for automatically optimizing and resizing your images.

Image Optimization

In most cases, PressThumb will automatically optimize images when they're displayed. Normally, an image embedded on a page or post would look something like this:

<img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image.jpg">

When PressThumb is enabled and configured, the image URL will be appended to include the optimized or .webp version, based on the site visitor's browser. The resulting URL would look like this:

<img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image.optimal.jpg">

 On in the event that the visitor's browser supports the further optimized webp format, it would be converted to this:

<img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image.jpg.webp"> 

Image Resizing

Once PressThumb is enabled and configured on your WordPress site, most images will be automatically optimized and resized accordingly. For example, the default behavior when inserting an image into a WordPress post looks something like this:

<img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image-1024x528.jpg">

As you can see, WordPress resizes images uploaded through the media library and resizes them based on a few pre-defined sizes (usually determined by your theme). But what if that changes later down the road or you need a size that wasn't already defined? That's where PressThumb comes in.

If you wanted the image in a different size, all you have to do is change the parameters in the URL. For example, if you wanted that same image in 512x164, you'd just edit the path like this:

<img src="http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/image-512x164.jpg">

Disabling Optimization of .webp Files

If you don't want to optimize existing .webp files, you can easily disable the automatic optimization by inserting the PRESSTHUMB_USE_WEBP constant into your wp-config.php file like this:

define('PRESSTHUMB_USE_WEBP', false);

Further Optimization and Storage

PressThumb also supports other features, based on your individual needs such as adding watermarks. If you have a particular need for additional image processing or storage on your site, feel free to reach out to our support team for any options that may be available to you.