🖼️ Control Image Sizes for Performance
Uploaded 4000px image, used as thumbnail. Wasteful. Media settings define thumbnail, medium, large sizes. Smaller files, faster loading.
📝 Configure Image Sizes
Settings → Media
Thumbnail size: 150px × 150px (crop)
Medium size: 300px × 300px
Large size: 1024px × 1024px
Crop options:
- Check to crop exactly to size
- Uncheck to scale proportionally
Recommended sizes:
- Thumbnail: 150×150 crop (good for archives)
- Medium: 300×300 (good for blog posts)
- Large: 1024×1024 (good for featured images)
Custom sizes in functions.php:
add_image_size('featured-large', 1200, 600, true);
add_image_size('homepage-banner', 1920, 500, true);
✅ Regenerate Thumbnails
- Plugin: Regenerate Thumbnails
- After changing sizes, regenerate existing images
- Use WP-CLI: wp media regenerate
- New sizes apply only to new uploads
“Images were 4000px wide, site was slow. Changed to 1024px large size. Page load dropped 40%. Media settings are essential for performance.”