Compressing images before uploading them to your website is one of the easiest and most effective ways to improve your website's load time, thereby improving your visitors' website experience and boosting your search rankings.
Large images can significantly slow down a site's performance, which is generally bad news. Luckily, there are some great tools at your disposal to help you optimize your images with ease. We'll take a look at 7 of the best image compression tools online...and, as a bonus, they're free to use!
Geek Free Image Compression
Geek Free Image Compression is an established player in the online image compression business. Its compression algorithm provides excellent all-around performance by significantly reducing image size without adversely affecting its quality from a visual point of view. As the name suggests, it works specifically with the PNG file type.
https://www.geekersoft.cn/image-compress-online.html
In addition to compressing PNG images, it will also compress JPEG images. The free version limits the file size you can upload to 5mb, but that should be more than enough. If your image is much larger than this, it will still be too large for your site, even with compression. You can upload many images at one time.
Using Geek Free Image Compression is easy. You simply drag and drop the files into the dotted area 9 as shown in the screenshot above), and in just a few seconds, depending on the size of the file you uploaded, you will be given links to download the files individually or all to a zip.
You'll also see how much the file size has been reduced (get ready to be impressed!
Geek Free Image Compressor also offers an offline version of the program that automatically optimizes all your images.
Kraken
Kraken is generally regarded as one of the most reliable image optimization tools. It offers 3 main compression modes; Lossless, Lossy and Expert, in each case different optimization algorithms operate accordingly.
Lossy optimization mode is definitely sufficient for most users. It results in images that are typically 60-80% smaller in file size compared to the original image. The images produced by this algorithm are of such high quality that you can hardly distinguish them from the original.
If you are a photographer or professional who needs to work with the highest quality images, then you may want to choose the lossless mode, which does not degrade the quality of compressed images at all. This mode will save as much file weight as possible without affecting pixel information. This is suitable for situations where high visual quality is required, such as marketing graphics.
Finally, Expert View provides users with more detailed adjustments and, as the name suggests, is designed for users who are already familiar with the process of image processing and optimization. Here you can set different quality levels for lossy JPEG and PNG optimization, preserve certain entries in EXIF metadata, and automatically modify image orientation. You can even set custom chroma subsampling values for JPEG images.
The Kraken tool supports JPEG, PNG, and GIF, and you can optimize files up to 1 MB for free.
JPEG optimizer
JPEG optimizers are also a powerful solution and have been around for a while. It only supports JPEG format. The powerful feature that sets this tool apart from the rest is that it allows you to resize images to the new width before the optimization process begins.
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The default compression level is 65, which is sufficient in most cases, but you can manually set it to any compression level between 0 and 99 you want.
optimization
Optimizilla is similar to Geek image compression in that it supports JPEG and PNG formats. It produces images with a good quality/size ratio as it combines excellent optimization and lossy compression algorithms to achieve the smallest possible size while maintaining the quality level.
You can upload up to 20 images and see the compression percentage of each image before deciding whether the image should be downloaded or not. Furthermore, by clicking on each thumbnail, you can preview a comparison below it, which shows the original and compressed version of the image, and further modify the quality with the help of horizontal and vertical sliders. cool, right?
Compressor
Compressor.io is a popular choice when it comes to image optimization, capable of reducing file size by up to 90%.
You can optimize multiple files at once by batch importing using drag and drop. First, you choose between 3 compression types: Lossy, Lossless and Custom, then drag and drop files into it. After a few seconds, you can see the relevant stats for each image, which include before and after size, percentage of compression, total size saved and of course the download button for each image or one image saves them together in zip file.
Another great thing about this tool is that it supports JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF, and WEBP formats.
image recycling
ImageRecycle is lesser known in the world of image compression, but it's a great tool that supports JPG, PNG, GIF, and PDF formats.
In its default screen, you can only work with one file. Once the optimization is complete, you will see the original and compressed size, the percentage saved, and of course a download button.
If you are uploading multiple files at once, you must use the full optimizer. There you are given 2 options: Best Preservation and Original Quality, which is actually the corresponding lossy and lossless compression. By default, it's set to lossy compression, which might work for you unless you're very demanding like a photographer.
The maximum file size allowed per image is 30MB, which is much higher than many other similar tools.
You can also benefit from their WordPress plugin and access the cloud services page from the dashboard.
Summarize
Image optimization handled by cloud services has become a very popular way of reducing the size of images so they are suitable for uploading to websites. They are fast, easy and free to use. As such, they really should be a "must do" part of any web designer/developer's workflow when building or maintaining a website!