If you use a lot of images on your website, it’s important to optimize your images for both performance and SEO.
SEO Image Optimizer is a new plugin that helps you optimize the images that you use on your WooCommerce store, AliDropship store, or regular WordPress website.
SEO Image Optimizer comes from AliDropship, the developers of a dropshipping plugin that you can use with WooCommerce or as a standalone tool. We reviewed DropshipMe, another product from this developer, back in January of 2019.
Because of that connection, SEO Image Optimizer comes with several WooCommerce/AliDropship-specific features that are helpful for eCommerce stores.
So whether you’re running a dropshipping store, a regular eCommerce store, or just a regular WordPress site, check out our hands-on SEO Image Optimizer review to learn how this plugin can help you optimize your WordPress site’s images.
What Does SEO Image Optimizer Do?
SEO Image Optimizer helps you optimize your images in four main ways:
- Shrinks the size of your image files using compression.
- Automatically adds image alt text.
- Automatically adds image titles and rename files.
- Lets you add watermarks to your images to prevent image theft.
Compression
For compression, SEO Image Optimizer can automatically compress images as soon as you upload them using lossy compress — no manual action required.
SEO Image Optimizer also stores the original file, so that you can always revert back to the uncompressed version if needed.
Automatic Alt Text
If you want to optimize both your site and images for SEO, it’s important to add the image alt text (or alt tag) to each image on your site.
Image alt text provides Google with textual context about your images, which helps Google rank them.
On a side note, it also helps people who use screen readers browse your site, which is another big benefit.
To make sure each image has alt text, SEO Image Optimizer lets you set up your own alt text templates to apply to images on your site.
First, it includes dedicated templates specifically for WooCommerce products. For example, you can automatically assign the product title and variation information.
You can also set up custom templates for other images, like the images in your blog posts.
Title/File Renamer
In addition to optimizing image alt text, SEO Image Optimizer can also automatically add an image title and rename your file following the same templates that you use for alt text.
This option is available for WordPress sites and WooCommerce stores, but not for AliDropship stores for the time being.
SEO Image Optimizer can automatically change both the title and filename for your images.
But don’t worry! If you activate the automatic file name changing, SEO Image Optimizer will only change the file name for newly-uploaded images. It will not change the file name for older images because that would result in broken images.
Image Watermarking
Finally, you can also use SEO Image Optimizer to add either text-based or image-based watermarks to your images.
You can choose where to position your watermark and which images to add the watermark to.
SEO Image Optimizer Pricing
SEO Image Optimizer is a premium plugin. It costs $39, but that gets lifetime access, updates, and support, which is quite generous as most plugins make you renew after your first year.
Want to see it in action? Let’s go hands-on and I’ll show you exactly how SEO Image Optimizer works.
Hands-On With SEO Image Optimizer
SEO Image Optimizer is quite easy to use — pretty much all the settings are “set it and forget it”.
That is, you go through one time and configure the behavior and templates. Then, SEO Image Optimizer just works in the background to optimize your images.
Let’s go through how to use the four features that I mentioned above…
Image Compression
On average, images comprise about 50% of the file size of a webpage, so finding ways to shrink the size of your site’s images is important if you want to speed up WordPress and help your search engine rankings.
To access SEO Image Optimizer’s image compression features, you go to SEO Image Optimizer → Minimizer.
Here, you can click the Start Minimizing button to optimize all of your existing images. You can also use the Automatically minimize new images toggle to automatically compress new images when you upload them (or import them, if you’re using AliDropship to import products from AliExpress):
Once the process finishes, you can see how much size you saved:
SEO Image Optimizer doesn’t give you an option to choose between lossy and lossless compression. But based on the reduction percentage, I’m going to guess that it uses lossy compression.
Still, I didn’t see a big difference in image quality (though it is noticeable if you look closely), so it doesn’t seem like an overly-aggressive lossy algorithm.
Here’s the original image:
And here’s the compressed one:
Image Alt Text Templates
To set up your automatic image alt text, you go to SEO Image Optimizer → Alt Optimizer.
Here, you can set up two templates:
- One for product images (like those from WooCommerce or the standalone AliDropship plugin).
- One for other images, which would include images that you use in your posts and pages.
For product images, you can choose from pre-built templates or customize your own using tags for various product details.
For variable products, you can choose to only add variant image information to the alt text for product variant images:
For non-product images, you get a similar set of choices, just with different template tags:
Once you’ve set up your templates, you can automatically optimize all new images and/or rebuild the alt text for existing images.
Title/File Name Templates
The title and file name optimizer works pretty much exactly the same as the alt text optimizer.
You get the same template options and choices:
The important thing to remember here is that SEO Image Optimizer will not change the file name for existing images — it only works on new images. Again, this is to avoid breaking older images by changing their file names after you’ve already embedded them in your content.
Automatic Watermark Tool
Finally, you can set up watermarks by going to SEO Image Optimizer → Watermarker.
First, you can choose between using a:
- Text watermark
- Image watermark
You can then configure the watermark content, as well as its:
By default, SEO Image Optimizer only adds watermarks to your product images. But you can also use a toggle button to apply your watermark to non-product images, as well:
Do You Need to Have an eCommerce Store to Use SEO Image Optimizer?
As you can see above, a lot of the features in SEO Image Optimizer are focused on people using WooCommerce and/or AliDropship for eCommerce. For example, the detailed alt text and title/filename templates for products, as well as the watermarking for product images.
However, you do not need to be running an eCommerce store to use the plugin – you can still benefit from all the features on your regular blog images.
Long story short – SEO Image Optimizer is great for eCommerce stores because of its dedicated eCommerce features, but feel free to use it on a blog or other sites, too.
Final Thoughts on SEO Image Optimizer
Whether you’re running a dropshipping store with AliDropship, a regular eCommerce store, or a blog or static website, your images play an essential role in your site.
Optimizing your images will help you speed up your website, rank higher in Google (especially Google Image search), and create a more accessible WordPress site for visitors who are using screen readers.
To put your image optimization on autopilot, SEO Image Optimizer is a stellar option for a few reasons:
- Being able to automatically rename image filenames and set the alt text/title is a great timesaver.
- Compressing your images will boost your site’s page load times.
- Adding a watermark is great if you’re worried about image theft.
To get started, visit the SEO Image Optimizer website to learn more and purchase the plugin.
About Colin Newcomer
Colin Newcomer is a freelance blogger for hire with a background in SEO and affiliate marketing. He helps clients grow their web visibility by writing primarily about digital marketing, WordPress, and B2B topics.
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Keep reading the article at WP Mayor. The article was originally written by Colin Newcomer on 2020-01-22 06:00:00.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.