If you’ve been following our web design blog, you may have noticed that when it comes to your website’s performance on the wold wide web, terms like SEO optimization and accessibility keep popping up. That’s because, in addition to your site’s web design and page load time, these are two of the most factors that will help push your site up through a search engine’s rankings to where your clients and audience can find—and connect—with your business. Fortunately, there are several WordPress plugins that users can implement to help.

Optimizing Your WordPress Site Using Plugins

The world of website optimization is vast and ever-changing; that’s why it’s a good idea to work with clients to ensure that they have a solid understanding of what terms like SEO optimization, rankings, traffic, and conversions mean. This will not only empower business and website owners, but it will also give them a realistic expectation for how quickly the results they want are achievable or if their web presence goals need to be revisited and revised.

Take advantage of the resources at your disposal

When it comes to optimizing the content on your site, in addition to the slew of resources both on and off-line for business owners, WordPress offers a wide array of plugin options that can not only speed up your website but also improve your SEO rankings and resultantly, your web presence.

As you may remember, there are several factors to consider when choosing photos for your website. High-resolution images are not only unnecessarily large in file size, they drastically slow down your page speed—which will cause you to lose a certain percentage of your audience.

Instead of wasting time and resources on reducing images or settling with low-quality pictures, we’ve compiled our favorite WordPress plugins for compression and image SEO solutions.

WP Smush

This user-friendly plugin is easily one of the fastest and best-performing, paid image compression plugins for WordPress. With WP Smush, you can compress .jpeg, .gif and .png images up to 32MB either individually or in bulk through the application’s dedicated “smushing” servers. This WordPress plugin is programmed to run work in different ways based on the file type uploaded.

What “smushing” means:

• The plugin strips the metadata from your .jpeg files to optimize compression
• The plugin converts moving .gifs to indexed .pngs and then strips the unused colors from the resultant indexed images.
• You can also automate the plugin’s functions so that all your new images get compressed immediately upon upload to your site.

CW Image Optimizer

This free plugin was based on WP Smush.it but uses a different protocol and set of optimization tools that ensure that your images will never leave your server. Although it may seem like just another plugin that automatically optimizes your website’s images because this plugin uses Linux littleutils, it isn’t for beginners.

SEO Friendly Images

This plugin edits all your images with the correct “alt tag, ” and “title” attributes that are needed to help boost your SEO. And, if you haven’t set your website’s images with these attributes, this plugin allows you define each attribute according to the options that are best for your brand.

Do I need to worry about ‘alt tags’ and titles?

In short, yes. Unless you are working with a web presence company that will do this for you, creating a .alt attribute will describe your image to search engines, while your users will see the title of your image automatically as their cursor hovers over it.

Work with a Team That Can Do the Heavy Lifting

When it comes to web design, it’s often the smallest details that hold the biggest impact. When your business or brand is at stake, it’s important to work with web design experts who have the skills and experience to get the job done right. Connect with us today to talk to a designer about what your business needs out of its website.