Building exclusively for Mobile devices we’re always keen on shaving off as much of the weight on our products as possible to provide a near instant experience, but this is not limited to mobiles. Websites these days have become eye-candy ( well, most of them ) with gorgeous images, beautiful effects, or simple designs that load in a heartbeat. All the most successful ones have one thing in common! They serve and optimize their content to the point of madness! Let’s not forget, for a properly coded website, 90% or more of it’s weight will be in the assets. Here is where some absolutely amazing plugins come in to save your day and make your page load faster! Much faster!
Why do I need this?
Smart websites use proper scripts that preload images while you move around the page, the smarter websites, use a CDN to deliver them and load them even faster, and pro websites also optimize their images. In this day and age, technology has reached the point where an image needs to be quite big to look gorgeous on all devices, considering the high density and high definition screens out there, this will only increase in time. Therefore, optimizing images is an absolute must. The differences can cost you dearly in visitors.
Take for example the following two products. The first one is our very own Appeca Mobile Template the second one, is a competitors product. They are both mobile, both have mostly the same features with different designs and concepts applied, but when you check performances, you’ll realize our product is designed for speed and a huge decrease in Bounce Rates ( we’ll discus them closely ) and the other, is only built to look good, which in turn seriously affects the loading speed, and thus, the Bounce Rate. Meaning, more users will just close the page rather than wait an eternity for it to load.
Both mobile pages in the example above have been tested on their homepages, with roughly 5 pictures each plus their individual scripts. Our product has to load 8 images that have been compressed an optimized with one of the compressors we’ll speak about below, the other, has not. Our 8 pictures used, weight little over 140 kilobytes, our competitor however, weights a little over 1.3 megabytes. And if that doesn’t cause any cause for concern, the page differences are staggering. Our page loads 3.1 seconds faster. But we’re not here to market our product. We’re here to explain, why that 3.1 seconds of extra load time is a catastrophe for you as the end user.
Meet the infamous Bounce Rate. Which roughly translates to how faster a user gets sick of waiting for your page to load and just quits it. And from Google, the general web statistic is that 65% of Mobile Users abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load! Now, in the case presented above, if you’d have 10.000 visitors a day, and you’d use an optimized product, your Bounce Rate would between at an average of 26% that translates to loosing about 2600 visitors. Not bad right? Could be better, but this is based on Google’s own statistics. Now, in the case of the second, poorly optimized example, the bounce rate of 63% translates to 6300 users out of 10.000 would leave before the page loads! This is catastrophic!
Now that we got this out of the way, we can’t stress enough! Most websites out there are already implementing preloading techniques for images such as lazy load, but remember, that will still have to load, so it’s only half the battle won especially if the image is at the very top of the page where the preloader can’t really do much about it! Therefore, optimize your images!
Let’s Meet the competitors Compressors!
We’ll be taking a look only on the tools that provide a WordPress Plugin as well.
- ShortPixel – Online Compressor– WordPress Plugin
- Imagify – Online Compressor – WordPress Plugin
- TinyPNG – Online Compressor– WordPress Plugin
- Kraken – Online Compressor – WordPress Plugin
All these tools have one amazing thing in common! If you’re a developer building a project, then you want to optimize your images for your customers and download them right away, therefore, the Online Compressor is for you, if you’re an end user with a WordPress Website, it can be annoying to optimize each image on a site, download it and then upload it to your WordPress admin panel, luckily, all these services provide WordPress Plugins, where you skip the online compressor. Just drag and drop the images to your page and everything will be taken care for you!
What are we judging by?
We’ll take each of these tools and feature the most important aspects that we use ourselves and we know our customers always need. You can visit each website individually and read their About sections to find out even more! The utmost important features though, we’ll be covering here!
Free VS Premium
Let’s see what each compressor offers as a free version! Usually this is what makes or breaks a premium tool! Having the ability to check and see what it offers before pulling out your credit card.
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Based on this assessment, the clear winner here is ShortPixel, followed closely by TinyPNG ( based on the 500 free credits, if you images are not large, this will be great for you ).
Compression & Image Formats
Moving on to the formats available. This is quite important and most of the time a deal-breaker. As GIF’s are slowly coming back to life, and we all have that one customer that loves PDF’s a little too much, these are what each one of our chose compressors can offer you.
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Again, the clear winner here is ShortPixel, Followed closely by Imagify, Kraken and lastly TinyPNG
Compression Results
The Most Important aspect of any of these after finding out what formats you can use and what sizes you are limited to, is, of course, what output they can output. One, a 160.7 kB JPG image, and a 126.3 PNG image. Let’s see the compression results.
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This is a difficult call to make. Both ShortPixel and TinyPNG are close, and well, for the sake of the name we were expecting TinyPNG to come out first! But, putting it into a different perspective, if your images will come from a camera, and not from software like PhotoShop or Illustrator then, there’s a 95% chance you’ll be using the JPG format. Based on the fact that most websites out there use JPG as their predominant image format, we’ll give this round to ShortPixel again, followed closely by TinyPNG.
ShortPixel – 66.89% Improved
Imagify – 58.12% Improved
TinyPNG – 55.44% Improved
Kraken – 53.39% Improved
Pricing Plans
By now, you most likely have a clear winner and a very close runner up, we surely do. But, let’s see how much will these cost. We’ll not be including a table, but we’ll discuss each plan individually with links to their pricing pages! Please note that this post was generated in December 2017, be sure to check the pricing links, as these may change. We’re also going to be showing off the best price for average users. However, you can opt in for a much larger image capacity and therefore a larger cost if you need to!
Plans
- ShortPixel OneTime – 10.000 Images – $9.99
- ShortPixel Monthly – 5.000 Images – $4.99
- Imagify OneTime – 10.000 Images – $9.99
- Imagify Monthly- 10.000 Images – $4.99
- Kranen OneTime – 500 MB – $5.00
- TinyPNG – Unknown Limit – $25
Winner for Output Quality & Pricing- ShortPixel
We believe ShortPixel is the clear winner here. If you’re like us, you want your bounce rate as small as possible. Therefore, even 1 kilobyte will count a lot for you. Although the amount of images is half than it’s competitor, Imagify, the plan is robust and defined on the amount of images used, not on a specific size. In this plan you’ll also be getting Priority Support, no file size limit, one API key for multiple sites, lossless, glossy and lossy optimization. Also, you’ll get automatic and bulk optimization and a nifty little WordPress plugin plus PHP compression tools. Everything coupled up with the fact that it’s the absolute winner for image optimization results and features. If you’re a pro, developer, or just want to make sure stuff will be perfectly optimized, then ShortPixel is for you!
Winner for Pricing – Imagify
Moving on to the runner ups, we believe that in the case of Imagify. Why? Because it offers double the amount of images for the same price as ShortPixel. But, although it does come close to Shortpixel based on the analysis made above, it seems to be just a hair’s distance away from the winner. However, if you’re a newbie and you’re still experimenting, then Imagify is definitely for you.
Runner Ups – Kraken and TinyPNG
In the case of Kraken, a 500 Megabyte limit is absolutely great. Moreover, if you’re using images from websites such as PixaBay or Unsplash you’ll soon realize that 500 Megabytes doesn’t really mean a lot. In the best case scenario, you’ll probably get 500 images optimized.
Last but not least there is TinyPNG. A great $25 for unlimited everything sounds great. If you’re unsure on how many images you plan on editing, but it will most certainly be more than 25.000 ( to compare it to the same cost on ShortPixel ) then TinyPNG is for you. Otherwise, get ShortPixel, Imagify or Kraken and order yourself a Pizza! TinyPNG is great for developers, but not knowing exactly what the limits are, is a bot odd. Therefore, I’d personally get in touch with them before putting in 25$ and tossing enterprise level images at their site. Chances are there is a limit that is not mentioned, as with all “unlimited services”.
Premium Givaway – 5 Coupons from the Winner – ShortPixel
A few days after posting our initial “Best Optimization Tool for Images” where we crowned ShortPixel the winner, their Head of Product, Alex Florescu sent us a message. He was telling us we’re getting a free premium pack from them for the post! We had something different in mind, and thanks to Alex, we decided to give our Coupons, to you! ShortPixel offered us 5 Coupons for the One-Time 10k plan, worth $9.99! Equivalent to 10.000 Optimized Images, and we will give these away to the first 5 of our Customers that enter the giveaway.
How do you enter?
It’s simple! If you’re a customer of ours, simply send us your Item Purchase Code via our Contact Form. If you’re not a customer of ours, all you have to do is purchase any item from our Store and follow the previous step. We’ll reply and give you the coupon code which will allow you to unlock the One-Time 10.000 Images package and optimize away! Note! This offer is limited to 5 Coupons Only! There is no reservation! First 5 customers get the promotional discount codes!
Ending words?
To sum this up, there’s no way you can go wrong with any of these tools! All of them will provide a much needed increase in speed! We based our review on the performance these tools showed when used on a development scale. There even the most minute detail is relevant. But if you’re just starting up, and you have no optimization on your page, any of these tools will make a tremendous difference in load times!
Let us know what you think? What’s your favorite from the bunch? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below!