About this plugin
Image Weight Guard helps WordPress users keep their Media Library light and their websites fast. It converts JPG and PNG images to WebP, optimizes them, and stops unnecessarily huge images from being uploaded.
When someone picks an image larger than your size limit (3 MB by default) in the Media Library or the editor’s media modal, a popup appears:
This image is larger than necessary. Recommended: under 500 KB. [Optimize & Upload] [Cancel]
Clicking Optimize & Upload resizes, compresses and converts the image to WebP, removes hidden metadata and cleans the file name, then uploads it to the Media Library.
The plugin can also convert and optimize the images that are already in your Media Library in one click, and it updates the image links in your content automatically.
The plugin works with WordPress image attachments regardless of which page builder or theme you use. It does not require an external service or API.
Features
- Convert every new JPG, JPEG and PNG upload to WebP automatically.
- Optimize uploads: resize large images, compress to a target size, remove EXIF and GPS data.
- Clean file names, for example Homepage Banner FINAL final2.JPG becomes homepage-banner.webp.
- Stop images over your size limit and offer a one-click “Optimize & Upload” popup.
- Cancel an oversized image while still uploading your other selected files.
- Convert and optimize the images already in your Media Library from the settings page.
- Rebuild thumbnails and update image links in posts, pages, custom fields and settings.
- Keep a backup copy of the original files when optimizing existing images.
- Choose the output format: WebP, AVIF or JPEG.
- Adjust the size limit, target size, maximum width/height and quality.
- Works in the Media Library and in the editor’s media modal.
- Does not require an external service or API. Images are processed on your own server.
How It Works
- Upload an image in the Media Library or the editor’s media modal.
- Images under the size limit are converted to optimized WebP automatically.
- If an image is over the limit, a popup asks whether to optimize it.
- Click Optimize & Upload to resize, compress and convert the image, or Cancel to skip it.
- To clean up images you uploaded earlier, open Settings > Image Weight Guard and click Optimize existing images.
License
0-or-later license.