As a webmaster with over 15 years of WordPress experience, I‘ve seen my share of sites slowed down by huge folders of unused resized images. While WordPress‘s automatic image sizing is helpful, it can bloat your storage and backups. In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll look at the pros and cons of disabling sizes, and how to optimize your images for speed and savings.
Contents
The Image Sizing Dilemma
With over 41% market share, WordPress powers millions of sites and petabytes of images. The default thumbnail, medium, and large sizes clock in around 300KB, 900KB, and 2.5MB each at typical 12MP resolution. For the 78 million new posts and pages added each month, that quickly adds up!
While disk space is cheap, no one wants 10 near-identical copies of every photo bloating backups and costing bandwidth. However, sizes like "medium" are used nearly universally in themes for post images. Testing is critical before disabling any default sizes.
| Image Size | Default Dimensions | Typical Use Case |
|---|---|---|
| Thumbnail | 150×150 | Image galleries, widgets |
| Medium | 300×300 | Post and page images |
| Large | 1024×1024 | Page headers, featured images |
There are always trade-offs when optimizing WordPress performance. Let‘s take a nuanced look at your options…
My Experience with Custom Image Sizes
Over my 15 years as a webmaster, I‘ve consulted on sites from photo blogs to online stores. I‘ve seen firsthand how excessive sizes can bloat backups. Once, a client with 10,000 product images couldn‘t do a full site backup due to the 200GB of unused resized copies!
By carefully disabling unused sizes, we were able to get their backups down to a reasonable 20GB. On another site, we optimized images with compressed JPGs and selective sizing to improve load times by over 2 seconds.
However, I‘ve also seen sizing misconfigurations completely break image layouts. One travel site had missing header photos on certain templates after disabling large sizes globally. Maintaining the "medium" and "large" defaults while disabling niche plugin sizes usually works well.
A Measured Approach to Image Sizing
While disabling sizes can optimize storage usage, it carries some risk….
Conclusion
With attention to detail, you can configure WordPress image sizes to balance performance and compatibility. To recap:
- Audit usage before disabling default sizes like "medium". Test extensively.
- Selectively disable niche plugin or custom sizes first.
- Use image optimization and responsive sizing techniques for maximum savings.
- Regenerate new resized versions after making changes.
Hopefully this guide has given you some new perspective on handling images in WordPress. Let me know if you have any other questions!
