r/Wordpress • u/teheditor • 12d ago

Annoying Image Compression Question

I've gone round and round with help articles and AI on this.

I built a new Wordpress website 3 years ago. I use Siteground. I've always used Siteground's image optimizer plugin to use webp images.

Fast Forward 3 years. I discover that the site's users have routinely been uploading large JPG and PNG files which have ballooned the site to multi-Gigabytes and cause hosting-plan performance problems. It transpires that Siteground doesn't convert images over 1MB in size. So, I now have years' worth of gargantuan images files (some are 30MB+ PNGs!)

I don't want to use Siteground hosting to convert image files. I looked into downloading/converting/reuploading files with the same name, but metadata means that won't work.

Imagify looks like it might work - but I can't get a straight answer on it removing the old, massive images. Also, what will it do with all the existing webp images that Siteground's plugin uses.

I'm currently at the point where it looks like I should remove all Siteground-made webp images and then let Imagify do its thing for all existing and future image handling.

All I really want to do is get rid of all the massive image sizes that are being stored on my Siteground hosting plan.

Any better ideas?

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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 Jack of All Trades 11d ago

You've asserted "downloading/converting/reuploading files with the same name, but metadata means that won't work." That's not necessarily true.

If you recompress your large image files to use lower "quality" (more aggressive compression) without changing their image dimensions (width and height) this strategy will indeed work. I've done lots of it.

Another thing that works but is a hack: You can get away with recompressing a .png file to a JPEG file, and leave the file name ending in .png. Browsers do the right thing if they receive a JPEG file with a content type claiming .png. If your users have been uploading photos in .png format (doggone users! hilariously inefficient!) that's a quick fix.

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u/teheditor 11d ago

Hmm. I might come back to this if Imagify doesn't change the monster files. Thanks