How to Compress Gifs to Make Uploading Them to WordPress Easier

Maybe you missed it, but animated GIFs have gone mainstream. They’re on Twitter, Facebook, and some of your favorite SaaS blogs. And while they’re fun to look at, if you don’t compress GIF files, they may take forever to upload to WordPress (and then drag down your site’s performance once they finally do upload).

So, just like with other image types, it pays to compress GIFs before you upload them to WordPress. And while you can compress GIFs manually with Photoshop or other image editing tools, I don’t think most of us want to spend that much time on each individual GIF. So, I’ll take you through a few popular GIF compression tools and find out which tool offers the best combination of file size reduction and GIF quality.

Why It’s Important to Compress GIFs

Do you know how much of an average web page’s file size is images? A massive ~63% according to Akamai! That means image compression, including GIFs, is one of the biggest things you can do to shrink your page size and improve your load times.

But that’s not the only reason to compress GIFs. Some WordPress installs have upload limits as low as 2MB. So, unless you want to dig in and change the WordPress upload limit, you need to keep your file sizes down if you want to upload them.

And finally, GIFs are just plain large files. They’re significantly larger than comparable video files, which is a massive pain for any readers with slow Internet connections or bandwidth limits. Do your users a favor by making your GIFs as small as possible.

How GIF Compression is Typically Handled

If you’re not familiar with compression, there are two basic types:

• Lossy – Lossy compression offers the greatest file size reduction, but it does so at the expensive of image quality. You’ll save more space, but your GIF won’t look as good.
• Lossless – Lossless compression won’t offer as much size savings, but it will preserve the original quality of your GIF.

For GIFs, lossy compression typically works by doing two connected things:

• Removing colors, which shrinks the amount of data in the file.
• Dithering, which blends colors together to similarly reduce the amount of data needed.

There are some other methods like comparing frames for duplicated data, but those methods won’t get you a ton of size savings.

Most GIF compression tools are lossy, but I’ll try to cover at least one tool which offers near lossless GIF compression.

The Best Tools to Compress GIFS

It’s easy to find compression tools by searching for them on Google. But you don’t want any old tool, right? You want the best GIF compression tool. So, to find the best, I decided to test some of the most popular tools.

Here’s how I’ll do it:

I’ll pick an uncompressed GIF and run it through each tool. Then, I’ll show you the newly compressed GIF (so you can assess the quality) as well as the compressed file size.

The GIF I’m using is one created from an Elegant Themes YouTube video. It looks like this and has an uncompressed file size of 1.92MB. Eeesh, that’s big. Sorry guys!

Now, let’s check out the tools…

Compressor.io – Lossy GIF Compression

While Compressor.io offers lossless compression for JPEGs and PNGs, it unfortunately only does lossy compression for GIFs. Let’s see how it works…

All you need to do is drag your GIF onto the tool’s web interface and it will automatically handle the compression. Here’s the result:

Compressior.io managed to shrink the file size to an impressive 1.20MB, a reduction of ~37%. That’s definitely significant. I do notice a minor decrease in quality (it definitely looks a bit fuzzier), but I don’t think the decrease is too bad considering the size savings.

Price: Free | More Information

EZGIF – Choose Your Compression Level

EZGIF is a nice tool because it allows you to choose a variety of different compression options for your GIF. They’re all lossy in some form or another, but you can choose how you want to strike the balance between file size and image quality:

I’ll choose Lossy GIF level 30 (slight) to try to maintain as much image quality as possible. Here’s the result:

For the setting I chose, EZGIF managed to reduce the file size to 1.39 MB, about a 27% reduction. While that’s nice, I don’t think the GIF looks any better than Compressor.io, which managed a larger file size reduction.

Price: Free | More Information

I Love Images – Identical to EZGIF

I Love Images promises the “best quality and compression.” Let’s see how they do:

I Love Images managed to compress my test GIF literally the exact same amount as EZGIF. The compressed version came out at 1.39MB, for a size reduction of ~27%. I’d say the quality is fairly identical to EZGIF as well. So far, the winner is still Compressor.io in my book.

Price: Free | More Information

GIF Reducer – Choose Your Dithering

GIF Reducer has a nice feature that lets you choose whether or not to add dithering to your GIF. Dithering is essentially blending nearby colors together to reduce file size. For this test, I’ll choose No Dithering to preserve as much quality as possible:

Another cool feature is that GIF Reducer creates a number of different compressed GIFs with different levels of color reduction. For example, I can select a GIF with 220, 200, 128, 64, or 32 colors. Here’s what a still of the 32-color compressed GIF looks like:

That’s a little too much compression! So, I’ll use the 128-color version for this example:

The 128-color version has a file size of 1.71 MB, for a reduction of ~11%. Of all the compressed GIFs, I think this one has the best quality.

Price: Free | More Information

The Verdict – Which GIF Compression Tool Should You Use?

After using these four tools, I actually have two picks for you! Each depending on your exact situation:

If you want the best combination of file size reduction and quality, I think Compressor.io is the clear winner. It had the biggest reduction while maintaining a decent quality.

If you’re more concerned with lossless compression, I recommend using GIF Reducer and choosing one of the versions with 128+ colors. The file size reductions aren’t massive, but 11% is nothing to sneer at.

Do you have experience with GIF compression? If so, what tools have you found to be the most effective? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

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