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

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.

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:

Then, if you also want the video optimization add-on, that’s another €15.83/mo.

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.
• Works with video files – optimizes them and delivers to the visitors, just like images.

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 three 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.
• Video optimization costs extra. I normally wouldn’t mention this, but if you want to handle videos, it will more or less double the amount you pay monthly.

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?