One of the main reason behind the popularity of WordPress is its repository of plugins. You’ve got a plugin to do almost anything – integration of social sharing buttons, managing mailing lists or creating static html files, etc. There are also plugins to optimize your blog for speed and performance.

For a page carrying lots of images, it is necessary to optimize the images for best performance and to prevent slow loading of the page.

Click here for tips on: JPEG Optimization For The Web

Here are some recommended plugins for WordPress to optimize your images and increase your site’s speed and performance.

1. Hammy

Hammy optimizes your page content’s images. It generates images of various sizes based on your content size and when a user accesses your website, it automatically displays the most appropriately sized image (sometimes the smallest size).

This helps your website load faster, especially for mobiles users. Hammy is easy to set up, giving you only three options to configure.

2. Lazy Load

Lazy Loading is a process in which images are only loaded when the user sees the image. Lazy Load plugin is the easiest plugin you’ll ever have to use – just install and activate – and it needs no configurations.

Lazy Load makes your site load faster and preserves your server’s bandwidth.

3. Imsanity

Imsanity resizes uploaded images if they are larger than the configured size. The only options you need to configure are the maximum size of uploaded images and jpeg image quality.

It works upon the uploading of images. Imsanity also provides a bulk-resize feature which can be used to resize images that were uploaded prior to installing Imsanity.

4. WP Parallel Loading System

HTTP 1.0 allows only two connections from a domain. WP-PLS creates subdomains of your blog and allow downloading of files from them. Browsers get more hostnames to download content from, making multiple connections and downloading multiple required files quicker, making your wesbite faster!

5. CW Image Optimizer

Want to reduce the sizes of your images without any loss in quality? This plugin shoudl work well. However, it is not easy to setup, especially if your site is on shared hosting.

It also provide a bulk optimize feature if you’ve got many images to optimize.

6. EWWW Image Optimizer

This plugin decreases the size of your images without affecting image quality. It is easy to setup and the author provides step-by-step installation instructions on the plugin page. Also includes a bulk optimize feature.

7. PB Responsive Images

Responsive images are images that fit according to a visitor’s screen resolution, no technical coding required. You can configure images size and the plugin will automatically insert the responsive image syntax in the post.

This helps you accommodate to readers who visit your side via mobile or tablet devices.

8. WP Smush.it

A plugin which uses Yahoo’s Smush.it service to optimize your images and reduce their size, Smush.it is a popular plugin that needs no configuration.

Just install and activate it, and it will optimize every image you upload automatically. It also provides an optimize in bulk feature.

9. Parallelize

This is an appropriately named plugin which parallelize resources among many hostnames, thus allowing browsers to download files from multiple domains thereby enhancing page loading time.

Configuring Parallelize is easy but risky; follow the instructions as closely as possible.

Have other WordPress plugins that can help you optimize your images for faster loading times? Share them with us in the comments below.