“Efficiently Encode Images” is one of the most common warnings triggered by Google PageSpeed Insights when you audit your website’s performance.

Efficiently Encode Images warning indicates your images need to be optimized better.

Let’s explain the meaning of the Efficiently Encode Images warning in detail and the importance of optimized images on your WordPress website.

We will also explore the 5 powerful techniques for fixing the warning and discuss how using RabbitLoader would mitigate the issue without any manual effort.

What Does Efficiently Encode Images Warning Mean?

The Efficiently Encode Images warning indicates that you need to optimize images to reduce the file size of the image without compromising its quality, known as lossless compression. 

Any uncompressed image on your web page would increase the web page’s total size, as the unoptimized image itself would represent a bigger image file size. 

These larger-sized images take more time to download to the visitor’s browser. Increasing the total page loading time of your WordPress website and delivering a less-than-ideal user experience to your website’s visitors.

By optimizing all the images on your WordPress website, you can improve the loading speed for all the pages on your website. A quicker loading time leads to a better user experience for your visitors and higher SEO rankings for your website.   

How Does an Efficiently Encoded Image Differ from a Resized Image?

The Efficiently encoding images warning indicates that you need to compress your images without reducing their quality to increase your page speed score. Compressing your images can be lossy or lossless. In lossy compression, the image’s size is reduced along with its original quality.

However, in lossless compression, the size of your image will be reduced without compromising its quality for a better user experience. Therefore, when you are trying to optimize your image, you need to ensure that it does not affect your image quality and it’s important that you do not just resize your images. 

How to Efficiently Encode Images for WordPress Websites?  

To improve your web performance, you need to fix this efficiently encoding images warning triggered by Google Pagespeed Insights. How can you solve this warning? 

We have the solution for you. Here we will mention the 5 most essential tips and techniques to fix this warning for your WordPress website, which include:

1. Reduce the file size of your uncompressed images
2. Optimize your images by converting AVIF or WebP images (Next-gen format)
3. Use an Image CDN on your WordPress website
4. Implement Lazy loading for above-the-fold content

Let’s dive into these 5 essential tips and techniques to fix this warning for your WordPress website. And how RabbitLoader will help you to implement these above strategies in your wordpress website. 

Reduce the file size of your uncompressed images

By compressing images, you can reduce the size of your large-sized images. Image compression has two types: lossy compression(reducing the quality of the original image) and lossless compression (compress images without reducing the image quality). 

Without RabbitLoader:

When you use RabbitLoader for your website optimization, its inbuilt lossless compression feature reduces the image size without compromising its visual quality.

Let’s see how much RabbitLoader can reduce an image’s size without reducing its quality. In this rlboost.store website, the image size is 567 KB. However, after using RabbitLoader, the size of the image is reduced by 11.3 KB. 

Optimize your images by converting AVIF or WebP formats (Next-gen format)

Image optimization is another efficient technique to fix the efficient encoding of image issues. By converting your large-sized JPEG and PNG images to AVIF and WebP format, you can fix this issue.

With RabbitLoader:

RabbitLoader has an in-built image optimizer that can convert images (especially your JPEG and PNG images) to next-gen image format such as WebP image and AVIF image. By converting to these new formats you can improve your image loading time by approximately 39%. 

For example, in this rlboost.store website, the image is in JPG format. But RabbitLoader will convert this image into AVIF format. 

Use an Image CDN on your WordPress website

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces the physical distance between your user and the origin server. For example, if your origin server is located in India and your user is from Chicago, USA, this high distance will affect the loading speed.

By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you can store the static resources in the user’s nearest edge/proxy server. Therefore, to fix this efficient encoding of image issues, you need to use an image CDN.

When you are using RabbitLoader, a premium CDN will cache your all optimized images for fast loading. It will reduce the latency. Especially it is helpful for your Largest Contentful Paint Images.

As you can see in this image, without RabbitLoader, the total time is very high. In the case of Tokyo, the time is 610 ms. but after using RabbitLoader, this total time will dramatically reduce to just 26 ms.

Implement Lazy load for above-the-fold content

By implementing lazy loading, you can fix this efficient encoding of image issues. Lazy loading is an optimization technique wherein your website prioritizes to render the images that are visible in the viewport of your webpage. 

If you are not comfortable with coding, you can use the wordpress plugin. There are several plugins available in wordpress for lazy loading. But when you are using RabbitLoader for other optimization techniques. Then why are you putting extra effort and money into other plugins? 

RabbitLoader ensures that the images below the fold that appear later on your webpage are lazy-loaded, and the offscreen images are deferred. By lazy-loading, RabbitLoader frees the browser from rendering the images that are more important for the viewport. 

Conclusion

If you are facing the efficiently encode images warning when you are auditing the performance of your wordpress site and struggling to fix this efficiently encode images warning, you must apply the above strategies which include:

•  Reduce the file size of your uncompressed images
• Optimize your images by converting AVIF or WebP images (Next-gen format)
• Use an Image CDN on your WordPress website
• Implement Lazy loading for above-the-fold content

If you want to fix this efficiently encode images warnings in your wordpress site in a few clicks, then you must install RabbitLoader. It also improves your core web vital metrics (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, Interactive to Next Paint and others) performance along with the user experience as well as SEO rankings.