In this guide, you will learn how to optimize images on your WPML-powered website using the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin.
Getting started
To follow this tutorial, install and activate the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin by navigating to Plugins → Add New.
Also, make sure that you have activated WPML Multilingual CMS, WPML String Translation, and WPML Translation Management plugins. In case you want to have different images for the pages that you will translate, please activate the Media Translation plugin.
For a seamless translation experience, we recommend enabling WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. You can do this by going to go to the WPML → Settings page. Under the How to translate posts and pages section, check the “Use WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor” option.
Create your own team of local translators from the Translation Roles tab in Translation Management and assign translation jobs to them.
Setting up EWWW Image Optimizer on multilingual sites
EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimizes new images as they are uploaded. If you wish to optimize existing images on your site, follow the steps below:
Navigate to Media → Bulk Optimize and click on the Scan for unoptimized images button.
Scanning your media library for unoptimized images
Click the Optimize images button.
Optimizing the images
WPML’s Multilingual CMS plugin allows you to translate the media metadata such as the description, Alt text, and caption while translating the page or post content. Additionally, you can use a different image for the translation via the Media Translation add-on.
It is worth mentioning that EWWW Image Optimizer automatically optimizes the default language images along with the secondary language images (in case you’re using different images for translations).
Easy Image Optimizer CDN
On top of optimizing the images on your site, EWWW Image Optimizer offers “Easy Image Optimizer CDN”. A content delivery network (CDN) helps with improving your site’s performance by delivering the content of your website to your users from the nearest server in the network. This contributes to reducing the page loading time.
There is no special configuration to run Easy Image optimizer CDN on your multilingual site as Easy Image optimizer CDN automatically fetches the list of domains from WPML (in case you are setting the “Language URL format” to “A different domain per language”) and rewrites any matching image URLs to be optimized by the CDN.
Need help?
In case you need help optimizing images on your WPML multilingual site using EWWW Image Optimizer, visit WPML’s support forum.
