How to optimize, compress, convert images to WebP WordPress

How to optimize, compress, convert images to WebP in WordPress with EWWW Image Optimizer plugin including JPEG, PNG, GIF, ICO and lazyload support, speed up and optimize WordPress. Switching to the WebP format for your images will improve the performance of your WP site and improve the visitor’s experience.

How to optimize, compress, convert images to WebP WordPress

WordPress supports the most popular image file formats, including JPG, PNG, GIF, and ICO, and the WebP image format was recently added to this list. Finally, WebP is supported in all major browsers (Opera, Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox) and so most websites can start using them today.

There are quite a few plugins to help you do this, but itsmeit has tested and found the most useful is EWWW Image Optimizer which includes both paid and free Pro versions. But free is enough.

Note before using the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin to compress or convert images to WebP WordPress, your hosting or VPS must have a lot of space. The plugin will convert, convert your images to webp format, as well as resize images to fit screens. So it will take up a bit more of your disk space.

Step 1. Install the plugin to convert JPG, PNG.. to webp images for WordPress

Visit the download page to download the zip file, then log in to the admin management page, click Plugin->Add new->Upload Plugin to install. Or you can also search “ EWWW Image Optimizer ” and install it directly.

Continue to click Activate once the plugin has been installed and move on to the next step to configure image compress and convert images to WebP WordPress.

Step 2. Configure to create and use WebP images for Wordpress site

Click Settings -> EWWW Image Optimizer, here there will be 2 modes, Easy Mode and, Ludicrous Mode if you are inexperienced, itsmeit recommend you experiment with Easy Mode first.

Easy Mode Configuration

As you can see, there are quite a few functions and options that allow you to process images, such as convert images to WebP wordpress, deleting metadata, resize… please configure it like your screenshot.

Configure Ludicrous Mode

This is a mode with more advanced customizations, you can enable automatic scheduling with a cronjob, remove images that you don’t want to change, or optimize custom folders.

Use it to optimize, convert images to webp for WordPress your way, but with itsmeit, only care about the ” JPG Quality Level ” and ” WebP Quality Level ” items in the Advanced tab. The default is 75-82 but it will still resize so you should set the value to 100 for the best image converted to WebP.

Continue, tick the ” Resize Existing Images ” and ” Resize Other Images ” in the Resize tab and ignore the rest of the tabs.

Click “ Save Changes ” after completing the setup and move on to step 3 “Bulk Optimizer”.

Step 3. Optimize images and convert PNG, JPG to webp in WordPress

To do this you can click “ Bulk Optimizer ” in the top right corner in Settings -> EWWW Image Optimizer, or Media->Bulk Optimize.

Click “ Scan for unoptimized images ” to start scanning the library and perform optimization, if you do not want to optimize the images in webp format, then check the box “ Skip compression and only attempt WebP conversion. ” on the right.

If you later do not want to use EWWW Image Optimizer to optimize images you can uninstall and delete the optimized images generated by the plugin by opening Tool->EWWW Image Optimizer.

Very easy isn’t it, that’s the whole process of compressing and converting JPG, PNG images to webp format for WordPress with the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin. Also, if you have a lot of unused images, you can delete them using the Media Cleaner Pro plugin.