It is now an established fact that website speed affects SEO and website rankings as well. The search engines are getting smarter with each passing day and the algorithms keeps changing and images are an important part of the on-page optimization. Too many images can slow down your website, therefore image optimization has become quite necessary. Apart from other aspects of image optimization that you can do yourself, file size also plays a major role in affecting the speed and rankings. If your site doesn’t load fast, your visitors are more likely to leave your site immediately and this happens more on mobile websites where connections are slower. You need to optimize your site for fast loading speed and images play a major role in your website loading time.

The image sizes should be as small as possible without compromising on the quality of the images. But, you don’t make your browser resize the images because if will not make any difference to the load times. The browser will load the original image first and then the resized one. The best way to optimize images for fast loading speed is through plugins. There are many options in the WordPress repository that allows you to compress images and other media files without compromising on the quality. In this article, we will discuss Image Recycle plugin, one of the plugins that we have tested and that will help you optimize your images and other media files.

Image Recycle Plugin

ImageRecycle is an image optimization plugin much like other plugins that compresses the images without any compromise on the quality thus reducing page load time. However, it is different from other image optimization tools, the plugin also has a unique functionality, not only it optimizes online images but PDF files as well. Their unique algorithm can compress your images and PDF files up to 80% and the quality remains similar to that of your original file. It accepts various formats for images such as PNG, JPG and GIF files as well. ImageRecycle supports many CMS platforms including, WordPress, Joomla, Magento and others. I will talk about the WordPress plugin ‘ImageRecycle’ in this article.

The plugin is really fast as it uses WordPress framework for all the plugin and it is incredibly easy to use as well. The Pro version users can resize images or optimize pages with the support of CSS pairing. The Pro users can restore the original image if they need and they can retain it for a month. The plugin also works really well with huge files, it optimizes files up to 30MB while other plugin doesn’t support them.

Features

Let’s look at some of the features and what all you can do with the plugin

Optimize new & existing images

You can easily optimize new as well as existing images and PDF files using the plugin. Once you install the plugin and set it to optimize a particular file format, every new upload will get optimized automatically. For existing images, you can optimize the images one by one or you can also bulk optimize them. In the process, if you want to get back the original image or file, you can restore the images as well.

Image auto resizing

You can easily resize the images, you can select the option for auto image resizing. You can specify the size and the maximum size of all the images on the server will remain as you have specified in this option of the plugin.

Using Filter to find out your media files

The plugin facilitates easy filtering and sorting your media files for optimization. You can choose a particular option in the filtering tool to find your files. You can filter on the basis of dates, file type or status or even the heaviest file. This tool is handy if you want to optimize media files as per your requirement.

Optimization Quality

The plugin reduces the image and file sizes without compromising on the quality. The quality remains similar to that of the original file and is visually identical to the original. You can define the optimization quality of your files, if you want a print of a particular PDF files, you can disable the optimization and select NO compression for PDF files.

Optimization Exclusion

The plugin has an advanced exclusion parameter that gives you the option to exclude/include certain specified server folders for optimization. The features is especially useful for third party plugins and themes that add their own folders.

WooCommerce and third party plugin compatible

The plugin is quite powerful and configurable, it is compatible with several third party plugins including WooCommerce. You can select any media from any folder on the server for optimization, not only this you can select media files from other CMS as well.

Easy to use API

The plugin has easy to use API that you can implement in any of your custom projects. The API provides you well documented interface with all the tools for image and PDF compression.

PDF Report with White Label

The plugin also allows you to generate PDF reports with White Label for your clients, you can add your logo with the reports. The feature allows you to save up to 20 reports.

What makes the plugin unique?

• One of the biggest factor that makes the plugin different and better from its competitors that it has several affordable pricing plans for every need.
• They have monthly, yearly subscription as well as one-time plans. The plugin optimizes PDF files as well, this is again an advantage with the plugin.
• It is perfect for developers who can handle several clients’ sub accounts with one membership.
• All the plans have full page optimizer that scans and compresses all media files in a zip.
• Apart from WordPress, the plugin supports various other CMS as well.
• They have an API for custom integration.

Using Image Recycle

Using the plugin to compress your images or PDF files is quite simple, all you need to do is install this plugin and activate it with the help of an API key and you are good to go. It is perhaps the only plugin that optimizes images in formats such as jpeg, png and PDF files as well keeping the original quality intact. I liked the fact that you can specify the minimum and maximum file sizes that the plugin should work upon. Also, I like the fact that you can choose a particular folder and the plugin will optimize images only form that folder. And the best part, all of this happens in the background and you can do whatever you wish to do on WordPress without wasting your time.

Price

The plugin has various plans available including the free trial account that allows you to access their full services for 15 days. ImageRecycle has affordable plans compared to its competitors with similar features, all the plans call for a onetime payment that remains valid for a year.
All the plans allows you 1 month backup and restore facility. The plans are divided on the basis of the usage and the number of images or files. All the plans are for unlimited websites, free and unlimited sub-accounts with personal ticket support as well.

Let’s look at the pricing plans for One-time prices of ImageRecycle:

$10- 10k images and PDF files, 1GB of content
$20- 25k images and PDF files, 3GB of content
$50- 100k images and PDF files, 10GB of content

If your website has too many images and you require a bigger plan you can go for these:

$100- 200k images and PDF files, 25GB of content
$190- 400k images and PDF files, 50GB of content

They also have separate monthly plans for high volume of data optimization or resellers. These monthly plans come with dedicated support. These high volume plans also have free trial, monthly as well as yearly memberships.

Support and Documentation

ImageRecycle offers you brilliant customer support with active support public forum where people can post their pre-sales queries, comment about their services. Apart from this, they have a dedicated support team and support is available for all subscription including the free trial version. They have an organized ticket based support wherein you can fill a form with your queries in the member area. Support is available on business days and you’re guaranteed to get help within two business days.

The plugin has documentation available as well for the new users, including screenshots, video tutorials, text documentation. For an image optimization plugin, they have provided sufficient documentation to help you initially with the plugin.

Final Word

ImageRecycle is a great plugin with unique features that sets it apart from the competitors. It is perfect for those with a huge media or their website relies on images, bloggers, eCommerce sites and even magazine and photography website as the plugin optimizes PDF files as well. With the kind of features, prices and support, the plugin is a bargain and it is certainly worth a try. This plugin is recommended for anyone who wishes to optimize their site for fast loading time and better search engine rankings.