Keep reading my Optimole review for some real test data and a hands-on look at this tool.
I touched on the main features above, but now let’s get a little deeper into what Optimole is actually doing on your WordPress site.
Optimole can automatically use lossy or lossless compression to shrink the file size of the images that you upload to your site. That’s certainly helpful, but there are a lot of quality image compression plugins already, so that’s definitely not the most unique thing about Optimole.
First, Optimole dynamically serves different image sizes based on the browser and viewport of each individual visitor.
For example, someone on a 750 px wide smartphone doesn’t need the same image size as someone on a 2880 px wide retina screen. Optimole takes that into account and serves a smaller image to the smartphone user and a higher resolution image to the retina screen user.
Beyond that, Optimole also serves your images via its own CDN to speed up global load times.
On free plans, this is a “custom made CDN” (not 100% sure what that entails), while paid plans use the Amazon CloudFront CDN to deliver images.
Finally, Optimole also adds lazy loading to delay loading below-the-fold images until a user starts scrolling down the page without the need for jQuery.
Optimole offers both free and paid plans.
Additionally, the free tier uses Optimole’s own custom built CDN.
After that, paid plans start at $9 per month for more optimization/bandwidth and use of Amazon CloudFront as the CDN.
On the highest tier plans, you also get the ability to use your own custom domain name for the CDN-served images, rather than an Optimole subdomain.
For this hands-on section, I’ll first show you around the Optimole dashboard. Then, I’ll share some data on how much Optimole compresses images and how the dynamic image sizing works.
To configure most of Optimole’s settings, you’ll go to the General Settings tab.
Enable image replacement – this lets Optimole replace your own image URLs with the optimized images served from the Optimole CDN.
Admin bar status – this lets you see your Optimole usage in the WordPress toolbar.
Resize larger images – in addition to the dynamic resizing, you can also have Optimole automatically resize large images.
If you want to automatically watermark your images, that’s what the Watermark options area is for.
Beyond the settings in your WordPress dashboard, Optimole also gives you a cloud dashboard where you can see usage across all the sites that you’re using Optimole on (and the same Optimole API key).
Above, you saw that after uploading a bunch of random images to my site, my average compression rate is sitting at about 60% with Optimole’s Auto compression setting.
Now, though, I want to show you the other part of the equation, which is how Optimole automatically resizes the images that it serves based on a user’s device.
To do that, I’m going to use Chrome Developer Tools to emulate a few different devices and see how the original size of the image changes.
Optimole is very easy to use – you pretty much just upload it, plug in your API key, and it starts working.
And the watermark feature is nice to have if you want it, though I don’t think that’s as big of a differentiator.
So if you want those extra features, give Optimole a look. You can get started for free at WordPress.org. Then, if you need more usage and/or you want access to the Amazon CloudFront CDN integration, you can upgrade starting at just $9 per month.