Compress Your Visuals with ShortPixel (Review + Tutorial)

One thing we all agree unquestionably is we hate slowly loading web pages. ShortPixel is an online image compression tool that can treat such slow-loading web pages with tons of images. Today’s review is about the ShortPixel compressor.

In this ShortPixel review, you will find out,

ShortPixel Review: Size Matters

I’ve been using quite a few online image compression tools before moving to ShortPixel. You can find my honest, data-driven comparison between ShortPixel and other top image compression tools below.

If you’ve any questions, complaints, or suggestions you would like to add to this ShortPixel review, please share them on the comment form below.

How does ShortPixel Work?

The procedure of ShortPixel differs according to how you’re going to use ShortPixel for compression.

Basically, there is two way to use ShortPixel for compressing images, PDFs, and animated GIFs.

1. WordPress Plugin — ShortPixel WP plugin lets you compress images inside the WordPress dashboard
2. Online Compressor — Upload and compress images on the go

I will briefly talk about how to use each method to optimize your images without compromising on quality.

How to Use ShortPixel WordPress Plugin

If you have a WordPress blog, using ShortPixel is pretty much easier. Once you install the ShortPixel WordPress plugin on your WordPress blog, it will automatically optimize images such as JPG, JPEG, PNG, and animated GIF files and eBooks, guides, and tutorial PDF files automatically, no matter how you upload them to your WordPress site.

Here’s how to work with the ShortPixel WordPress plugin.

Login to your WordPress admin by using your admin username and password.

Navigate to Plugins >> Add New >> Search “ShortPixel”

Install the ShortPixel plugin and Activate it.

Create your free ShortPixel account by clicking the button below and grabbing your API key from your Dashboard.

Copy and paste your ShortPixel API key to Settings in ShortPixel. Save your Changes.

Now you have successfully integrated ShortPixel with your WordPress blog.

Your API key is fundamental to running ShortPixel successfully on your blog. Once you’ve optimized a couple of images and PDF files on your blog, you can see their details in your ShortPixel account’s Analytics pages.

So, it all makes sense to protect your ShortPixel API key to save ShortPixel credits and collect accurate results for optimized content.

As you’ve integrated ShortPixel with your WordPress blog, you can now optimize images in a WordPress blog in three different ways.

Optimize Images Automatically

When you upload a new image to a post in the WordPress editor, ShortPixel will optimize them automatically. You should be known that when you upload an image to WordPress, it creates six different variations for situations like image thumbnails. You can learn about WordPress image sizes and qualities over here.

Therefore, you should be aware that if you upload ten images per post, then it will automatically create 60 image variations, so it will cost 60 ShortPixel credits if and only if the compression ratio is higher than 5%. Yes, If your images aren’t optimized more than 5%, ShortPixel won’t charge in credits.

Optimize Images in Bulk

What if your blog already has hundreds of images installed? How would you optimize them without removing existing images?

Luckily for you, ShortPixel could do this time-saving activity easily. In fact, ShortPixel could optimize existing images in your media library and replace older or unoptimized ones automatically or have older ones as a copy and replace them with new, optimized images. This is a beneficial feature, as I know some of you have thousands of unoptimized photos in your blogs.

Optimize Images upload via FTP

If you’re a web developer and using FTP to upload files to your WordPress blog, there’s nothing to worry about optimizing images because ShortPixel does it for you, no matter how you upload images to WordPress.

You could work on your blog in another tab while ShortPixel optimizes images for you because in no way it causes any harm to your blog process.

How to use ShortPixel Online Compression Tool?

Not all people use WordPress. Some of you may be using other blogging platforms such as Google’s Blogger and Tumblr. As a blogger, you should be really careful about your web page sizes because it matters more than the content itself! 🙂

If you are building a custom website (ex: for lead capturing, sales pages, agency landing page) or an e-commerce store using Woocommerce or Shopify, or a blog using Brizy, Squarespace, and Magento, you should want a way to optimize images online.

ShortPixel Free Image Compression tool makes optimizing images easier, faster, and more efficient.

Here are a few reasons why the ShortPixel online image compressor is the best on the Internet (I was gonna say in the market, Phew!).

Bulk Image Optimizer

You can upload up to 50 images (JPEG, PNG) and animated GIFs at once. If you look at other competitive image compressor tools, you will notice that most of them limit it to below 50, mostly 10 or 20. And you could download multiple files at once. ShortPixel will zip your images into one folder and let you download them faster.

No Upload file size

If you need only one reason why you should use ShortPixel above any other online image optimization tool, be it how much size of each object it allows uploading. If you’re a photographer or a photoblogger, your images may be 10MB, 20MB, or even 30+ MB in file size.

ShortPixel doesn’t care about upload file size. It’s all doing is reducing image sizes while optimizing images for their best performance.

Optimize animated GIF files

To be honest, I have used about a dozen online image compression tools before ShortPixel. Not any of those can optimize animated GIFs. As you know, animated images or GIFs normally have much larger file sizes than non-animated ones. Therefore, ShortPixel Online Image Compressor is an excellent tool for optimizing all types of images.

• Choose Compression level

ShortPixel allows you to select the compression level while uploading images. Basically, there are three levels – Lossy, Glossy, and Lossless.

However, you couldn’t select a pre-file size or an output file dimension with ShortPixel. These compression levels give you the control to optimize images accordingly. Check below the compression level graph to understand the uses of each part.

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Lossy

DESCRIPTION

The images optimized with the Lossy algorithm are the smallest optimized ones.

Image Optimization Percentage: 40%

Image Size Reduction: 171 KB → 102 KB

BEST USE

Content Marketing, Web development, Social Media Marketing

(Recommended image compression level)

Glossy

DESCRIPTION

Optimize images for Google, but takes the image’s quality.

Image Optimization Percentage: 14%

Image Size Reduction: 171 KB → 146 KB

BEST USE

Photographics, Images with large dimensions

Lossless

DESCRIPTION

Identical to original by pixels but smaller in size compared to lossy or glossy derivatives.

Image Optimization Percentage: 9%

Image Size Reduction: 171 KB → 155 KB

BEST USE

Creating Icons, Vector graphics, etc.

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ShortPixel PDF Compressor Tool

PDF or Portable Document Files is a global standard file format that runs on all operating systems, including mobile operating systems. You see reports, white papers, eBooks, and online guides in .pdf format because they are universally usable.

If you’re offering PDF files as “Content Upgrades” on your blog to collect more leads, optimizing them would save monthly bandwidth and improve user experience. It doesn’t affect highly, but it still does.

So, you could optimize PDF files online to reduce file size reasonably. ShortPixel Online PDF compressor allows you to upload up to 50 files at once. Therefore, it won’t take much time for you to optimize multiple PDF documents online with PDF Compressor.

ShortPixel Review: Features

ShortPixel is equipped with many features to ease your image compression workflow. I will list some of them in this ShortPixel review.

JPEG, PNG, WebP, and GIF Image Compression

ShortPixel supports all major image types, no matter how much or how you upload them. Here’s how I use them for my blog and other marketing campaigns.

JPEG

Also known as JPG. It’s the shortened name for Joint Picture Experts Group. I use this format basically for colorful images without white color background. When compressed, it won’t save image quality. Best for post thumbnails, featured images, etc.

PNG

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics. I regularly use this image file format because it saves image quality at its very best when compressed. The best use is for screenshots and images with white backgrounds.

WEBP

A new image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. The WebP image format was initially released on ‎30 September 2010 and developed by Google. According to Google Developers, WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. Use ShortPixel image compressor to optimize WebP images furthermore.

GIF

Graphics Interchange Format or GIF image type has different standards, particularly 87a and 89a, developed in 1987 and 1989. The higher the bit format (basic GIF format starts from 8 bit, which is similar to 256 variations (2^8)), supports more colors.

ShortPixel supports most GIF standards, so you could clearly reduce GIF size, decrease bandwidth, and increased page loading speed for your websites.

Optimize Google Drive images

ShortPixel app for Google Drive lets you optimize images in your Google Drive.

Developer API

If you’ve built a custom tool or software for clients, you could integrate ShortPixel into your software.

ShortPixel is a SaaS (Software-as-a-service) app. Therefore, it runs on the cloud, and you could expect a high uptime guarantee (ShortPixel runs on Amazon AWS). With the wide variety of services, it offers different ways to serve people to optimize visual content.

With developer API, you could run custom applications, connect multiple tools, and, importantly, build tools that could optimize offline images for your purposes!

Apart from Developer API, you could use ShortPixel technology to build tools that optimize images through…

• PHP Client Library – Read the documentation.
• ShortPixel Command Line Tool – Read the documentation.

Unlimited Websites

The best advantage I see of ShortPixel is that it the Limitless. You could upload images with any file size, and now you could use them on unlimited websites. ShortPixel pricing is also unbelievably cheaper than most. So, if you have multiple websites (I suppose you have more than one), ShortPixel is the best bet because it doesn’t limit websites you could integrate. 

Compare Original vs. Derivative

As marketers, we tend to do tests to find the optimal variation to grow our campaigns. One fascinating feature of ShortPixel that is most helpful is comparing original images versus derived images.

It allows you to see how effective each compression level for your project is.

Sub Accounts

This is good news if you run an agency or are offering clients SEO services.

You can create sub-accounts under your account and limit its resources. For example, if you have two clients who have subscribed to two different plans, you could offer them different sub-accounts, such as 10,000 monthly credits for the first customer and 25,000 monthly credits for the second customer.

Optimization report

ShortPixel tracks usage automatically for your account. The details are limited to the previous 40 days only and are pretty basic.

However, it’s the most you want to know as more advanced details don’t help your business but your happiness. It could be enhanced a bit more, but the developer team has expressed that they will be.

Archive Optimizer

Another very helpful feature I want to emphasize a bit in this ShortPixel review is the Archive Optimizer.

Let’s say you have made a custom website or a web page by hiring someone or using a page builder like Brizy. Chances are, the graphics, icons, and PDFs are not optimized.

ShortPixel’s Archive Optimizer lets you upload .zip archives with any type of files inside. ShortPixel will optimize it, and the resulting archive will retain all the files and folder structure.

• Set the compression level
• Set the maximum resize dimensions
• Replace images with next-gen image formats such as WebP and AVIF
• Keep EXIF data
• Convert CMYK to RGB

Free 100 Credits per month

It’s totally free to create an account in ShortPixel. A free ShortPixel account receives 100 credits every month for free.

Although you buy one-time credits, free credits will be used at first. That’s excellent news for bloggers who run the business on a budget.

ShortPixel Referral Program

ShortPixel has a tempting referral program that allows free account holders to increase their monthly credit size for free.

Once any person signs up to ShortPixel through your referral link and optimizes 50 new images that have not been optimized before, you (referrer) and the person will receive 100 free image credits per month for free for a lifetime!

The maximum referral credit you could earn is 1,000. It is fair enough if you run a small-sized blog.

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Is ShortPixel for Whom?

If you are an online marketer, visual content is connected with your business in any way somehow. Be it a blog post, social media post, or even an email newsletter. Visual content is as much important as your marketing strategy.

Without a strategy, you don’t know what you are doing.

Similarly, without visual content, you don’t know what you know about online marketing in the 21st century.

Here are the professions and the perfect use of ShortPixel.

ShortPixel Pricing

ShortPixel has two pricing models – Monthly Plans and One-time Plans.

1. MONTHLY PLANS
2. ONE-TIME PLANS

Here are ShortPixel’s one-time credit plans.

In fact, ShortPixel’s pricing is one of the cheapest online compressor tools. (Check the comparison table below to contrast ShortPixel fees versus others.)

ShortPixel Coupon

In the review of ShortPixel, I talked a lot about the tool and used it. I personally use ShortPixel for my blogs and other projects.

ShortPixel team provided a discount offer for Pitiya readers. Now, you can get 50% EXTRA credits for ANY PLAN! One-time or subscription packages.

Click here to activate this CRAZY discount.

Pros and Cons

In this review of ShortPixel, I talked about my experience with this image optimizer. However, there are some pros and cons I would like to emphasize in this article.

Pros

Cons

ShortPixel Alternatives

ShortPixel is not the only one that offers services to compress images online. There are several that have similar and unique features compared with ShortPixel.com.

So, in this ShortPixel review, I will list some best ShortPixel alternatives. Some are free, while others are premium.

TinyPNG

I used TinyPNG a lot before finding out ShortPixel. It did the work that it promised: Compressing images.

ShortPixel vs TinyPNG

TinyPNG is a robust image optimizer. And it is flexible to use as well. As a whole, it provides plugins and extensions for every major web application and software. Check out the available third-party integration tools over here.

Feature	ShortPixel	TinyPNG
Compress PNG and JPG files	Yes	Yes
Compress WebP images	No	No
Compress PDF files	Yes	No
Compression type selection	Yes	No
Upload size	No Limit	75MB in Premium plan
WordPress plugin	Yes	Yes
CDN	Yes *	Yes
Free Plan	Yes	Yes

* Available in ShortPixel.ai (ShortPixel Adaptive Images)

TinyPNG supports the APNG (Animated Portable Network Graphics) file extension as well. Since it has a robust developer API, and add-ins for Prestashop, Photoshop, Magento, and other applications, TinyPNG makes an excellent alternative to ShortPixel.

By comparing the prices ShortPixel vs. TinyPNG, ShortPixel has got three different pricing modules. But, TinyPNG offers a yearly paid plan that costs $25 per user annually. So, TinyPNG becomes a good option for photobloggers since there is no upload file limit.

OptiMole

Another alternative to ShortPixel with similar features but with expensive pricing.

ShortPixel vs OptiMole

Check out this comparison table of ShortPixel vs Optimole to find out which is better for you.

Feature	ShortPixel	OptiMole
Compress PNG and JPG files	Yes	Yes
Compress WebP images	No	Yes
Compress PDF files	Yes	No
Compression type selection	Yes	Yes
Upload size	No Limit	No Limit
WordPress plugin	Yes	Yes
CDN	Yes *	Yes
Free Plan	Yes	Yes **

** OptiMole is a WordPress-oriented image optimization service. It limits image optimization to up to 5,000 visits in the free plan. Read more about it here.

OptiMole uses Amazon Cloudfront CDN service that comes with 200+ edge locations all around the world. So, if you are particularly running a WordPress site and looking for a good plugin, maybe OptiMole is for you.

However, it doesn’t have the tools for online image compression for sites normally used, and site builders like Brizy Cloud (Learn more), Clickfunnels, and Elementor sites, OptiMole isn’t for you.

Comparing the pricing of ShortPixel vs. OptiMole, ShortPixel wins hands down, in my opinion. OptiMole’s first subscription tier is $22.90 per month. It limits sites to 25,000 visits per month! So, if your site receives 30,000 visitors a month, you will have to pay $47.00 per month!

Ewww

Ewww.io is another site like ShortPixel that offers services to compress your images online.

ShortPixel vs Ewww

One common feature between ShortPixel and Ewww is that both provide WordPress plugins. But, Ewww has some exclusive optimization features, such as JS/CSS optimization.

Feature	ShortPixel	OptiMole
Compress PNG and JPG files	Yes	Yes
Compress WebP images	No	Yes
Compress PDF files	Yes	No
Image resizing and scaling	No	Yes
Upload size	No Limit	No Limit
WordPress plugin	Yes	Yes
CDN	Yes *	Yes
Free Plan	Yes	No

Ewww provides users different plugins, such as Easy Image Optimizer and S3 Image Optimizer.

By comparing ShortPixel and Ewww, both have similar features, while Ewww has extra site optimization features. But, considering pricing plans, ShortPixel takes the lead. But I recommend trying both and finding out which is best for your business.

More ShortPixel Alternatives

I listed three ShortPixel competitors in this review. But, there are dozens of apps. Here are some of them.

1. Imagify — Online image optimization tool with a popular plugin for WordPress.
2. Smush — Another popular WordPress image optimization plugin with many features.
3. Jpegmini
4. CloudImage
5. Autoptimize — A WordPress plugin to optimize your site
6. Resmush.it

ShortPixel Review Conclusion

A few years ago, Google officially announced that they are using web page loading speed to rank web pages in Google SERP.

Amazon has found that every one-second delay in loading web pages could cost them around $1.6 billion in sales!

At the end of 2016, the number of mobile internet users surpassed the number of desktop users. According to Google’s new industry benchmarks for mobile page speed, mobile visitors don’t wait more than three seconds if your website fails to load at first.

Page speed is a direct cause for conversions, the website’s total performance, the stability of your business, and overall revenue.

As we know, one major culprit for slow-loading web pages is large-sized visual content.

You can easily reduce the size of web pages by simply compressing images. There are quite a few online image compressor tools online out there.

However, not all of them are powerful enough to compress your images as you want. Some tools lack support for image formats, and some have certain limits, such as the file size allowed to upload.

ShortPixel will be your first and foremost shot if you have used it a few times.

It has a free plan which gives 100 credits per month, and you can quickly increase the free credit by 1,000 by referring your friends to ShortPixel. There are fair one-time and monthly plans if you have a blog or a business that needs more than 1,000 credits per month.

I personally have a ShortPixel account that is subscribed to the Short plan. Have you used ShortPixel before? So, what are your thoughts about this compressor tool?

Useful Links

1. ShortPixel image optimizer for Android
2. ShortPixel Roadmap
3. ShortPixel API Tools
4. Terms of Service
5. ShortPixel FAQ
6. ShortPixel Website
7. ShortPixel Media Kit Download (.Zip)