I’ve been curious about something I’ve seen in the WordPress.org [documentation on image size and quality]):
>Typically, large high quality images should be kept between 100K and 60K. Smaller images should be closer to 30K and lower.
I am using a theme that recommends using featured images that are “at least 1200px wide.” And media.php suggests dimensions of 1200px by 675px. It’s difficult to get some photos of that size down to 100K using JPEG compression without introducing quantization artifacts.
**What I want to know:** Is there some reason the official WordPress.org documentation says a large high quality image as uploaded should be 100 kilobytes or smaller? Especially because WordPress makes crops of each image anyway, and there are also plugins that can further compress the images?
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It’s a recommendation. If your images file sizes are large, your page load performance will suffer, and therefore your Google ranking will (in theory) also suffer.
Photoshop > Save For Web (Med) is what I use on a daily basis and it’s the standard that all designers use. There are other tools/websites that can do the compression for you, but they aren’t as good.
Also, look into WebP, which will usually get you at least a 50% file size saving. Plugins like “WebP Express” will automatically generate WebP’s from your JPG/PNG files and serve them to browsers that accept them. However the author appears to have abandoned the plugin, so I’d recommend an alternative.