
GIF used to be quite common, but today really should only be used if you want an animated GIF image. JPEG does not support transparent backgrounds, though, so that’s when you should use a PNG. It has higher compression, meaning lower file size. JPEG is, by far, the preferred image format. If the image you are uploading does not have a transparent background (like a typical photo), then uploading it as a PNG is simply going to make it unnecessarily large. PNG files are best used when you need a transparent background. A PNG file uses less compression natively and that means the file sizes will be bigger. One of the most common mistakes is to use PNG files when there is no reason to. You have different kinds of image files, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. Let’s dive in… #1 – Use The Correct Image Formats So, you have every reason in the world to get this right. Bloated images slow down your site and that means Google is liable to penalize your site or downgrade your potential search rankings.įurther Reading: The Ultimate Guide To Search Engine Optimization For Bloggers Some of these good habits are very important for your site’s load time and, therefore, your SEO. The best option for keeping things nice and clean here is to use good habits to begin with. 5 Rules For An Efficient Wordpress Media Library And inside each of those folders, you will find the actual image files. Inside each year you will have folders for months. What you will usually see is a list of folders by year. Navigate to the folder for your site called /wp-content/uploads/. If you want to take a look for yourself, all you need to do is log into your server via FTP or using your web hosts file manager.

Yet, they sit there and take up disk space on your server. Much of the time, these custom image sizes aren’t even used. So, what happens is that every image you upload might turn into 5 or more separate files behind the scenes. Sometimes, themes and plug-ins define their own custom image sizes, too.

All of those sizes sit on the file system as well.

The files themselves are sitting on the file system and the database just has a record of where they are.Īlso, when you insert an image, you have different sizes available (large, medium, thumbnail, etc.). So, when you are going through your media library in your Wordpress admin, it is pulling those entries out of your database.
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How To Clean Up A Media Library That Has Already Gotten Bloated.#5 – Don’t Upload Multimedia To Your Media Library.

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