While image optimization in PHP websites requires extensive technical knowledge, a PHP image optimizer can help you easily reduce all your images in a PHP website, even without any technical expertise. 

Adding eye-catching images can make website content interesting by breaking the monotony, which may increase the average on-page time of the PHP website. However, unoptimized images can slow down your PHP website’s loading time, which can directly affect the conversion rate as well as the organic rankings. 

Hence, many PHP website owners invest their valuable time in searching for a proper PHP image optimizer. However, finding a good image optimizer for PHP websites might be tricky, and you don’t want to end up investing money in the wrong PHP image optimizer.

If you are facing the same challenges, RabbitLoader, the PHP image optimizer, could be the best solution for you. Here, we will disclose how RabbitLoader will optimize all your images on your PHP website within a few minutes and speed up the website.

But what if you like to explore technical things? For those who love to explore technical things, we will also discuss manual strategies for image optimization in PHP websites, which involve expertise in coding.   

Why Is Image Optimization Important for PHP Websites?

Before diving into, why most PHP website owners struggle to optimize images of their website. We will see why it is important to optimize the images of a PHP website. 

Let’s quickly explore the benefits of image optimization for PHP websites: 

• Optimizing images translates to a faster-loading website.
• Your website is more likely to pass the Core Web Vitals with the images optimized.
• Your visitors get a superior user experience.

Experience Faster Loading with Image Optimization:

When a visitor tries to open a new page on your website, the browser needs to load resources such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and image files in order to render a web page’s content. A single page now a day has more than one image on average. If the images are un-optimized it can typically increase the total file size of the page, which would inevitably slow down your PHP website’s loading time.

In such cases, image optimization is the only way to speed up the PHP website. Optimizing images can significantly reduce their size, which in turn would reduce the total file size of the page. Since page loading time depends on the total page file size, reducing the page file size can significantly improve the loading performance of your PHP website.

Image Optimization Helps You Pass the Core Web Vitals Assessment

During a website’s performance audit in Google PageSpeed Insights, the first thing you probably notice is the Core Web Vitals assessment.

Google scores a website based on its core web vitals performance like the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID). To pass this assessment, your Core Web Vitals metrics should be in the green zone. 

Optimizing images can noticeably improve the performance of Core Web Vitals, especially the impact of image optimization on LCP (measure the initial loading time of a website) performance is consequential. 

Image Optimization Enhances the User Experience of Your Website

Where your website or brand would be perceived based on the first impression of the user, the loading time of a website makes the first impression in the user’s mind about your website. While users are expecting a fast-loading website, your slow PHP website can frustrate them & lead them to lose trust in your website. 

According to research by Think With Google, if the website’s loading time is increased to 3 seconds from 1 second, the bounce rate will automatically increase by 32%.

However, optimizing the images can significantly improve the page loading time of a PHP website. Hence, it would lead to delivering a much better user experience, engaging the user with the website’s content. Since the bounce rate goes down with faster loading, speeding up the website can also increase the average on-page time of your PHP website, which can positively affect your conversion rate.

Now you already know the importance of image optimization for PHP websites. Now you may be inquisitive about how to optimize PHP images. There are two ways you can optimize images in a PHP website. If you are looking for a non-coding solution, you need to use a PHP image optimizer like RabbitLoader. 

1. Optimizing images manually
2. Optimizing images with the help of a PHP image optimizer like RabbitLoader. 

How To Optimize PHP Images Manually? 

If you are sound enough in coding and love to explore coding, then you can try the below image optimization strategies, which include:  

• Image compression
• Serve the images from CDN caching 
• Implement lazy loading
• Use an efficient browser caching

Image Compression

Image compression is one of the most effective image optimization methods for reducing image file size. There are two types of image compression. 

1. lossy image compression
2. lossless image compression

While lossy image compression reduces the image size by discarding the less critical information from the image file, lossless image compression reduces the image file size without losing the image quality.   

Let’s see how to compress images for the PHP website. 

To manually reduce the image size, you need to add some lines of code to your PHP file. Here is the code. You can use the code in any PHP file of the specific page of that website which is directly accessible 

<?php

 function compress($source, $destination, $quality) 

{ 

$info = getimagesize($source); 

if ($info['mime'] == 'image/jpeg') 

  $image = imagecreatefromjpeg($source); 

elseif ($info['mime'] == 'image/gif') 

  $image = imagecreatefromgif($source); 

elseif ($info['mime'] == 'image/png')

  $image = imagecreatefrompng($source);

 imagejpeg($image, $destination, $quality); 

return $destination; 

}

 $source_img = 'source.jpg'; 

$destination_img = 'destination .jpg'; 

$d = compress($source_img, $destination_img, 90);

 ?>

In the above code, we set the image quality to 90. Hence, this is a lossy compression. You can change this according to your requirements. While 0 indicates bad quality, 100 indicates good image quality. 

To improve the page loading performance, here are some advanced web optimization strategies. 

Serve the Images From CDN Caching 

For some users, the physical distance between the server and the user will be high, causing longer loading times. This will also increase the website’s network latency. 

When you implement a CDN, the static resource file such asimages will be served from the nearest edge server instead of the origin server. Hence, serving the images from a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can reduce the network latency by reducing the physical distance of images from your users.

Follow the below steps to implement a CDN in the PHP website. But keep in mind that before implementing a CDN, you need to back up the website, including all resource files and databases.   

Step 1: You need to set up and configure the CDN, which includes pointing to the origin server where the static resource files are stored and setting caching rules. 

Step 2: Here, we will mention a handy PHP function for implementing CDN caching on a PHP website which will be placed in a global file. 

function use_Cdn_Urls($html)

{

        $cdnUrl = "//cdn.domain.com";

//here, you need to put the domain name of the CDN that you want to implement 

        $baseUrl = "RabbitLoader.com";

//here you need to put the domain name of your website 

        /*

         * Remove all images or scripts that may be loaded with explicit domain

         * Match:

         * - http://domain.com/assets...

         * - https://domain.com/assets...

         * - //domain.com/assets...

         * - /assets...

         */

        $patterns = [

                // Match sources that are from the www or mobile urls

                // We check for the schema as well as protocol relative urls

            '~(<(img|script|link)[^>]*)(src|href) *= *(["\'])(https?:)?//(' . preg_quote($baseUrl) . ')~',

                // Match sources that just begin relative to the current domain

                // src="/assets/..."

                // Our regex matches the initial "/" character with a negative lookahead

                // ensuring the next character is not a slash

            '~(<(img|script|link)[^>]*)(src|href) *= *(["\'])/(?!/)~'

        ];

        $html = preg_replace_callback($patterns, function (array $matches) use ($cdnUrl) {

                //     <img|script...        '|"...         cdn url

                return $matches[1] . $matches[3] .  "=" . $matches[4] . $cdnUrl;

        }, $html);

        return $html;

}

Step 3: To call the above function directly in templates, you need to add two lines of code in that HTML file. 

$html = '<img src="https://domain.com/test.jpg" />';

echo useCdnUrls($html);

// will output

// <img src="//cdn.domain.com/test.jpg" />

Now, you can test whether the CDN caching is working in the staging environment before making it live. 

Implement Lazy Loading

Another way to speed up your website is to implement lazy loading in the images, that are not required during the initial loading time. This image optimization technique is more effective when your PHP website has thousands of images.  

When you add lazy load to your PHP website, the browser will only load the images that are essential for initial loading. The remaining images will load when the users scroll down to them. 

For example, if a web page has 5 images, 2 of which are above the fold, then you need to add lazy loading to the remaining 3 images. 

By following the steps below, you can easily add lazy load to the PHP website. 

• Step 1: First, you need to include blazy library for lazy loading in the HTML file. 

<script src=”js/blazy.js”></script> 

• Step 2: Add images to the HTML file and implement lazy loading for the non-critical images. 

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html lang="en">

  <head>

    <meta charset="utf-8">

    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

    <meta name="description" content="">

    <meta name="keywords" content="">

    <meta name="author" content="muni">

    <link rel="icon" href="../../favicon.ico">

    <title>Lazy Load Images Using JavaScript PHP</title>

  </head>

  <body>

<img class="b-lazy" 

src="critical_images"

data-src="images/1.jpg" 

alt=" critical Image 1" />

 </body>

</html>

• Step 3: Initialize lazy load library for lazy loading images. 

<script>

;(function() {

        // Initialize

     var bLazy = new Blazy(); 

    })();

</script>

Use an Efficient Browser Caching

When a user visits your website, the browser sends an HTTP request to the server. The server then sends the HTTP response to the browser to render the content. However, this process can increase the loading time of your PHP website. 

To counter this, you can implement browser caching in your PHP website. then the website’s static content will be directly retrieved from the browser cache instead of the origin server, increasing the page loading time of your PHP website. 

Follow the steps below to implement browser caching on the PHP website. 

• Step 1: First, you need to set the max-age in your PHP file to make an efficient caching policy on the PHP website. 

session_cache_limiter('none');

header('Cache-control: max-age='.(60*60*24*365));

header('Expires: '.gmdate(DATE_RFC1123,time()+60*60*24*365));

• Step 2: Add the code below to the header of your PHP file to get the best caching experience.

header('Last-Modified: '.gmdate(DATE_RFC1123,filemtime($path_to_image)));

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_IF_MODIFIED_SINCE'])) {

  header('HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified');

  die();

}

After applying these four effective image optimization strategies, your PHP website’s loading performance should improve. Several online tools, such as Google PageSeed Insights, GTmetrix, and others, can help you check the website’s performance improvement.

PHP Image Optimizer: How RabbitLoader Optimizes The Images

As you can see above, manually optimizing images requires expertise in coding. If you lack this expertise, this process can be daunting. 

Here, RabbitLoader comes in. 

Let’s explore how RabbitLoader optimizes the images and speeds up a PHP website. 

• Converting the images into next-gen formats. 
• Compressing images losslessly.
• Implementing lazy loading.
• Serving the images from CDN.
• Implementing browser caching mechanism.

Convert the Images into WebP and AVIF

During your PHP website’s performance auditing, you often encounter one of the most common suggestions: “Serve images in next-gen formats” in Google PageSpeed Insights. Serving images in next-gen format is necessary to improve the LCP performance and PSI score. 

RabbitLoader has an in-built bulk optimization feature that can convert all your images into next-gen formats such as WebP and AVIF. Optimized images would load faster than the original images, improving website performance. You don’t even need to upload images one by one, which will save you hours of manual work.  

Compress Images Losslessly

While image compression requires extensive PHP knowledge, using a PHP image optimizer can make the process easier. 

As a PHP image optimizer, RabbitLoader compresses all your uploaded images losslessly, which means the compressed image size will be reduced without losing its visual quality. 

Implement Lazy Loading

In order to implement lazy loading in a PHP-based website, you need to be proficient in JavaScript and HTML. However, with the help of RabbitLoader, you can easily implement lazy loading in the non-critical images and improve the website’s loading performance without having any coding expertise.  

Serving the Images from CDN

RabbitLoader has an in-built premium Content Delivery Network (CDN), you don’t need to invest in an external CDN and pay an expert to set it up for you. RabbitLoader serves the images from its CDN, which has 300+ edge servers.

Implement an Efficient Browser Caching Mechanism

Implementing a browser caching mechanism can speed up a PHP-based website’s loading performance, but it is time-consuming and complicated. A PHP image optimizer like RabbitLoader implements an efficient browser caching mechanism within a few minutes, so you don’t need to put any extra effort into this. 

Conclusion 

Many PHP website owners overlook image optimization due to its technicalities, which can negatively impact the entire website’s performance. When a website has too many images, improving its performance can be challenging without image optimization. 

Here, we have mentioned the most effective 4 image optimization strategies to improve PageSpeed performance. If you are ready to dirty your hands in coding, you can manually implement these strategies and speed up the PHP-based website.

Otherwise, the best way is to install a good PHP image optimizer like RabbitLoader and optimize images without having any coding expertise.   

FAQ: 1. How do you make a responsive image? 

By following the HTML and CSS code below, you can make a responsive image. 

HTML syntax:

<img src=”responsive_image.jpg” alt=”responsive image” class=”responsive”>

CSS syntax: 

.responsive {

  width: 100%;

  height: auto;

}

Here, to maintain the aspect ratio, we set the height attribute as “auto”. 

FAQ: 2. What is the Next-gen image format? 

The next-gen format is an optimized image format that maintains image quality while compressing a large image. AVIF and WebP images are the most common types of the Next-gen format. The optimized version of the images will be smaller in size and load faster than the original version. 

FAQ: 3. Can I add lazy loading in a background image?

Adding lazy loading to a background image can speed up the website’s performance; however, it’s not a good idea. When you add lazy loading to a background image that is available above the fold, the image will load later, hampering the user’s concentration.