Perfect Images is the image toolbox WordPress should have shipped with: decide which image sizes exist, regenerate thumbnails, replace an image without breaking anything, and add retina or modern formats like WebP and AVIF only if you want them. Everything is in one place, and every extra is a module you can leave off.

1. Start with the Setup Assistant

The Overview tab lists the modules, all of them optional, and a Setup Assistant that asks a few questions about your site and tells you what to turn on. It’s the quickest way to a clean setup.

2. Clean up your image sizes

Every time you upload a photo, WordPress, your theme and your plugins each create their own copies of it. Most sites never use half of them, and they fill your disk.

1. Open the Image Sizes tab: it lists every size registered by WordPress, your theme and your plugins, with its dimensions.
2. Switch off the sizes you don’t need, like medium_large or 1536x1536, and add your own custom sizes if your design needs them.
3. Want to keep your original uploads instead of WordPress’s “-scaled” copies? Turn off the Image Threshold in Settings.

3. Regenerate and replace

After changing sizes or switching themes, your existing images need new thumbnails. The Image Tools tab does it for the whole library, with a progress bar, or for one image at a time (turn on the Image Tools module in the Overview if you don’t see the tab).

To swap a photo for a better version without touching the posts that use it, turn on Image Replace in Settings → User Interface. Each image in the Media Library then gets a Replace Image action: the file changes, its address, links and thumbnails stay right.

4. Retina images (module)

On high-density screens (most phones and recent laptops), a thumbnail shown at its exact size can look soft. The Retina module creates sharper @2x versions and serves them only to the screens that need them.

1. Turn on Retina in the Overview.
2. In the Retina Images tab, keep the Responsive Images method (the recommended one, it works with WordPress’s own srcset) and pick the sizes that need it.
3. Build the retina files for your existing images from Image Tools. With Pro, you can also have a retina version of the full-size image.

5. Lighter images: WebP, AVIF or Easy IO

Modern formats make images up to about half the weight for the same quality. You have two ways to get there, and you pick one of them (they can’t both be on).

• Modern FormatsConverts to WebP or AVIF on your own server. Your originals stay untouched.
• Easy IOA CDN by EWWW converts, compresses and delivers your images worldwide, with no server setup.

For Modern Formats, turn it on in the Overview, choose WebP or AVIF with the switch right below it, and pick the sizes in its own tab (full-size conversion is Pro). For Easy IO, turn it on and follow its tab: it registers your site in a minute.

Curious how much it saves on a real site? We measured it on ours: how we cut our image bandwidth.

6. A little AI help (module)

• AI Assistant: it looks at your sizes and your theme, and tells you which ones to keep, which ones are redundant, and which retina sizes you don’t need. It uses AI Engine.
• Upscaling: when a photo is too small for a size or for its retina version, Claid.ai can upscale it instead of leaving it blurry.

Questions

Stuck somewhere? Our support is here to help.