WordPress image best practices for speed
Google PageSpeed recommends serving images under 100KB for blog post images and under 50KB for thumbnails. WordPress accepts JPEG, PNG, and WebP natively. Compressing before upload is faster than relying on plugins like Smush or ShortPixel — and your originals stay on your device.
Recommended settings for WordPress: JPEG at 80–85% quality. For featured images: 1200px wide, under 150KB. For thumbnails: 400px wide, under 40KB. For full-width hero images: 1920px wide, under 250KB.