Klix Image DimSum for WordPress Plugin Directory

Addicted to speed. Heck, who isn’t. Squeeze out better performance with little effort. And get a shot at a higher Google ranking.

Search engines, notably Google introduced speed in their ranking algorithm a few years ago. Yet, the average site runs above 10 seconds to the user. Big guns like Facebook, Twitter and Google deliver their site in under 2 seconds to the user. Yours should shoot for the same performance.

A lot of sites suffer in speed tests because large images really slows down the delivery of a website. Specifically, many sites serve huge images when they’re viewed as tiny thumbnails by the user. Caching can significantly speed up WP, but if you’re delivering elephants then caching elephants can only do so much.

DimSum turns those big elephant images into ones that are small and quality-controlled. And it does so in real-time.

This plugin resizes all blog images (home, post and pages) to their tagged width and height, and changes the compression for a perfect balance between quality and speed as seen fit by you, the site owner. It makes elephants into bite-sized dimsum whenever possible.

Results include not only increased performance but also increased site aesthetics and ease of use.

A) Performance issues include faster page delivery. Speed increases range from minor to significant, depending on the mis-matching of underlying file to that image seen by the user in the browser. It’s particularly useful for front pages that don’t use official thumbnail features but embed smaller representations of larger images. Optimizing large content is often the best way of increasing page delivery. As a corollary, DimSum decreases bandwidth usage which is important for (cloud) users who pay per usage.

B) Ease of use improvements are significant. Use an image without regard for its size. Which means no endless sizing in Photoshop or GIMP. One image is resized to perfectly suit each different page use in real-time.

Moreso, don’t rely on the few thumbnail sizes given to you by your theme. Generate any size you want without disturbing your site delivery time.

Save in the highest quality in Photoshop/Gimp. Upload and then downgrade in DimSum until a perfect tradeoff between quality and size is found. And, in WordPress, select the perfect size to match your content, using the 90%, 80%, 70%, 60% … scaling in the post area.

Finally, within seconds crank up or down the compression quality setting to suit the number of visitors (and thus server load) your site receives to better address your customer’s needs — until you upgrade to a faster server. Because one drowned server can ruin your day.

C) In the aesthetic department, images are not stretched out beyond their viewable resolution. In fact, images are perfect WYSIWYG between image on the filesystem and image in the browser, in terms of resolution and size. Nevertheless, nothing can increase quality beyond that found in the original file, so use the highest quality in the first upload.