Optimole Review – I Actually Tried It. Here’s What It Did to My Images

Okay, so let’s test this! This review walks through what Optimole is, what it does best, and what using it actually feels like. I’ll also show you how well it works, what it costs, and where it falls short. Let’s get into it!

What is Optimole

I’ve known about Optimole and have been using it for several years now. While this tool might have started as an image optimization plugin, it has grown into much more over the years.

Right now, Optimole positions itself as a “complete media optimization, real-time transformations, and digital asset management for WordPress” – sounds a bit corporate-y to my taste, but I have to agree that it’s also a good description of what Optimole can do these days.

I’d say there are three main elements of Optimole:

• 🖼️ The image optimization solution – with real-time optimization, smart resizing, and multi-format delivery
• 🌍 A global CDN – takes your images and distributes them through a CDN instead of your actual server, choosing a location closest to the visitor
• 📁 A custom media library for asset management in a centralized place

And, of course, it’s all been built for and around WordPress, but that goes without saying.

I’m going to go through all of Optimole’s features, usage, and will also test the real performance of its optimization in this review. But before we can do all that, there’s one question:

Key features

Automatic image optimization

If I were to name the no. 1 most important feature, this would have to be it.

In short, all images are optimized the moment you upload them to your site, so no extra work is needed.

If your site has lots of images, this kind of auto-optimization makes a huge difference both in the overall performance of your site and the work you have to put in.

Real-time resizing and format delivery

Optimole resizes images instantly based on each visitor’s screen size. Or, in other words, Optimole doesn’t show the same optimized image to everyone. It’s all tailored.

It chooses the best size of the image (based on screen) and the best format supported by the user’s browser. The process happens, again, automatically, with no settings to tweak.

This is great because your visitors see only what they need, which saves data and reduces loading times. It’s simple, smart, and helps every page feel faster.

Apart from the size and type of image, the best image quality is also selected based on the user’s device and connection quality (not everyone has fast internet). Optimole checks that and then adjusts image quality to match. High-speed users get higher quality. Slower networks get lighter images that still look good. This happens automatically, with no settings to manage. This sort of thing improves load speed without hurting appearance.

Global CDN with 450+ edge locations

For me, this is one of the main differentiators of Optimole’s.

Optimole delivers images through a CDN network, instead of serving them from your main web server. In short, Optimole creates copies of your images and distributes them to over 450 locations worldwide. Then, when a visitor wants to see an image, it gets served from the server that’s close to the visitor’s location.

This kind of global delivery means people in different countries all get quick access to your images. It reduces lag, especially on image-heavy pages. And, again, there’s no special configuration needed here either. This feature is especially useful for global businesses or sites with international audiences.

One-click WordPress setup and integration

Given that it’s WordPress we’re talking here and that Optimole was built as a WordPress plugin, there isn’t anything to integrate here. Just install the main plugin, sign up and connect to the Optimole service, and you’re good to go.

After that, it starts optimizing images automatically. What’s also important is that images are optimized in real-time with no extra steps or panels to adjust day to day. The plugin just sits there and works in the background.

Smart lazy loading

Lazy loading is one of those concepts that can speed up page loading times a lot, plus it’s really simple in principle. The idea is to simply not load images until they’re needed. With lazy loading, only the visible part of the page loads at first. Images below the fold appear as users scroll, saving bandwidth and reducing page size on initial load.

Optimole handles this without adding extra JavaScript, which is important since it keeps websites lighter. It works quietly behind the scenes and improves the browsing experience, especially on mobile. It’s also nice that you retain full power over how you want your lazy images to behave (in the settings).

Centralized media management

This is an interesting one since WordPress already comes with its native media library. However, Optimole argues it can do this better. So, with Optimole, you get access to its own space to manage all site images and media.

Key aspects of that are that files can be sorted by date or size, grouped into folders, and tagged for easy search – not something you get from WordPress itself. This can be helpful if you have large media libraries that are getting out of hand during normal use.

As an added perk, you can also make edits like resizing or watermarking right inside the platform (more on that later).

Using Optimole

There are two components to your Optimole experience: the WordPress plugin and the hosted service at Optimole.com. To get Optimole running fully, you need to install the plugin and sign up for the main service (you can do both directly through your site).

Let’s start with the plugin:

This part’s simple: just go to Plugins → Add New, type “Optimole” in the box, and you’re good to go.

Install, activate, etc.

When you’re done with that, you can see the main dashboard under Optimole’s section in the WordPress sidebar:

As you can see there, it first asks you to either create and connect your account, or alternatively, you can enter your API key if you already have an account.

Clicking on the first button will take you to Optimole.com, where you’ll be able to create your account. You’ll have to enter a couple of details, add your website domain there (so that Optimole knows the site where you want to optimize images), and pick your plan.

You can get started with the free version of Optimole. It’s more than capable for most small or new websites. (More on that in a sec.)

When you come back from Optimole, you can add your new API key to your site and thus finalize the connection.

Not sure where to get the API key from?

If you’re not sure where to get the API key from, it’s in the main panel at dashboard.optimole.com:

As soon as you approve the API key, Optimole starts doing its magic.

Let’s see what we can do in the settings:

Optimole settings

Here’s what the main settings panel looks like:

By default, Optimole will toggle the main option on – which is the master switch you can see above – “Enable Optimole Image Handling.” This is basically the main Optimole “on button.”

To be honest, why this button is even there, I don’t know. 🤷‍♂️ After all, why would you install any plugin at all if you’re then going to disable it in its own settings? Anyway, let’s see what else is there:

It’s a good idea to enable lazy loading and smart image scaling – the second toggle in the screenshot above.

Then, in the next tab – Image Storage – we see this:

This looks like a really useful option, especially if you’re dealing with limited space on your web hosting account. That second option – Optimole Cloud only – allows you to effectively offload all your images to Optimole’s network and thus save a ton of space on your server.

Next, let’s go into Advanced:

I really like this page. It’s basically where you can switch Optimole to a preset selection of settings. You can pick between three main presets:

• Speed Optimized – does whatever it can to prioritize loading times above all else
• Quality Optimized – optimizes your images as much as it can without suffering any visual quality loss
• Custom – this is where you can adjust individual toggles yourself; let’s see that one up close:

I’m a fan of these custom settings, to be honest. They allow me to tune up my image optimization to match the goals of my site, the volume of images I have, and how I want them handled. Nice!

I’m not going to go through every possible settings panel here, but let me just comment on the remaining ones quickly – luckily they’re rather self-explanatory:

Then, lastly, there’s the cloud library.

When enabled, Optimole will start offloading your media to its own library. You can see it if you click that main link shown above.

Once there, you can actually edit each of your images individually. Here are some of the options:

Very nice overall. My favorite options are those general Adjustments (you can tweak brightness, contrast, saturation – all very common toggles for image work), and Watermark (to make stealing your images harder).

When it comes to the “actual use” of Optimole, this is basically it.

The whole selling point of this tool is that you don’t really have to do anything with it other than activate it and configure it initially. After that, it works on autopilot, which is great indeed. 👍

But let’s see if all those optimizations are actually worth it:

Testing Optimole image optimization

Even though Optimole comes with a ton of features, the most important of them for most users is going to be the plugin’s image optimization abilities. Or, in other words, if this is subpar, then none of the other stuff will matter.

I wanted to do a very basic test here to see where things are at. Simply take a handful of images, compress them with Optimole, and see the results – a classic “before and after.”

Ten images in total were used for the test – five PNGs and five JPGs.

Click here to see the images:

Here are the results of the optimization:

As you can see, the results are pretty great all throughout. Optimole did a great job optimizing both JPG and PNG files, even though those graphics were of different parameters, different contrasts, different numbers of colors, and so on. Overall, this is very promising.

But let’s make things even more interesting. Let’s put all those images on a single blog page and test the load times of that page from multiple locations – first with Optimole disabled and then enabled. That way, we’ll see if the optimization has any impact on the loading times of a standard blog page.

{A few moments later}

Here are the results of the test. This time, I’m presenting only the differences in load times after Optimole was enabled:

There are some noticeable improvements across the board here – especially in overall load times. Granted, the load time improvement was smaller when testing from Europe because the server is also in Europe, so the page was already loading quickly even before the changes.

Also notice the total savings in page size, better LCPs, FCPs, and Speed Index (WebPageTest’s metric). The only number that’s a bit worse compared to before is TTFB. I don’t have a good explanation for that one, other than maybe different network conditions when doing the tests.

Pricing

Optimole comes in a couple of flavors. Most importantly, there’s a very capable free option available. Here are the parameters of that:

• free to use
• handles image optimization for up to 1,000 visits monthly
• unlimited bandwidth – your images can be of any size
• access to Cloudfront CDN (400 locations)
• auto-scaled images, smart lazy-loading
• 48h email support

The main limiting factor here is the hard cap on 1,000 visits a month. On the one hand, this is perfect for new websites and those with not a lot of traffic, but it can quickly become problematic if you grow beyond this limit.

At that stage, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the paid plans. Here are the options when paid yearly:

It makes sense to look at this pricing in context – compared to some of Optimole’s competitors. Here are the main players and their prices as of now:

EWWW:

Imagify:

WP Smush:

WP ShortPixel:

None of these solutions are exactly like Optimole. Some lack the CDN abilities, others limit the bandwidth heavily, limit the max upload size, or even replace your original images with optimized ones (meaning there’s no going back). It’s hard to tell whether Optimole is a good deal or not based on this. It all depends on your individual needs and what the most important features are for you when it comes to having your images optimized.

At first, the entry-level plan seems a bit expensive, but when you realize that you can use it to improve your web server performance and save on disk space, it can make sense.

Pros and cons

Pros

Basically, all the features Optimole comes with are its huge pros. Most specifically:

• Automatic image optimization – just works on autopilot; your job is pretty much done as soon as you install Optimole and set some starter settings.
• Real-time resizing and format delivery – Optimole will match the image format, dimensions, and quality to the visitor’s browser, screen, and internet connection quality.
• Global CDN with 450+ edge locations – delivers your images through a server that’s near your visitor, which speeds things up a lot.
• Smart lazy loading – picks which images on a page to lazy load, how many of them, and how to handle the process.
• Centralized media management – you get access to Optimole’s own panel for digital asset management.

Last but not least, Optimole is honestly super easy to use. There’s no difficult setup or operation. Any WordPress user will be able to handle it.

Cons

I see two main ones:

• The free plan is limited to 1,000 visits a month. As I mentioned, this is enough for new sites or small ones, but you can grow above those limits sooner than you think.
• Overall expensive compared to competition.

Final verdict on Optimole

In the end, I think Optimole is the only true all-in-one solution on the image optimization market. It will compress your images, retain the originals, serve everything through a global CDN network, and also let you manage all your assets from a centralized location. It also handles images if you need them.

Plus, you can use it for free if your site is small enough.

There’s hardly any better entry point to image optimization imaginable. You can test the waters, see how image optimization works in practice, and make your site faster and smaller in the process.

I certainly encourage you to give it a shot and see how you like it. Getting started is free, after all, plus you won’t lose the original versions of your images – meaning there’s no risk.

Let me know what you think if you’ve already tested Optimole yourself. Has it become your image optimizer of choice?