How to optimize images in WordPress themes and plugins with ShortPixel

You already know that website speed has a tremendous influence on your SEO strategy, but one less known fact is that you can optimize images in WordPress themes and plugins also with ShortPixel, not only the images and thumbnails from the Media Library.

Think for a moment, what images are displayed most often on your website? Usually not the images featured in your most popular articles, but the graphics included in your WordPress theme. They are shown on every page of your site. Reducing the size of these images can give your website a speed boost, and better results in Google Insights tests. Of course, the improvement depends on the theme you use. A heavy graphics theme would benefit more than a minimal one.

Optimizing images in your WordPress theme with ShortPixel is a simple process:

1. The first step is to navigate to the ShortPixel settings menu, and click on Advanced tab.

2. Then click on the Select button, and choose the folder where your theme is installed. Or you can select the WordPress themes folder if you want to optimize the images from all your themes.

After you located and selected the theme folder, click on Add folder.

The theme folder is now accessible for ShortPixel image optimization process.

In case you mistakenly choose a wrong folder then you can click on Stop optimizing to  exclude the folder from optimization.

3.  The optimization status for each image in the theme folder can be seen in the Other Media list, under the Media menu.

All we did was to make the theme folder accessible to ShortPixel from Settings > Advanced. You can optimize any of your WP theme and plugins’ images in the same way.

For this tutorial, we used Portofolio Gallery by webdorado. It’s a beautiful theme with a lot of good reviews.