SEO: Boost Your Search Performance by Converting WordPress Images to WebP

This determines and stores the dominant color of newly uploaded images in the WordPress media library,
and uses it to create a color placeholder background on the frontend that's shown until the image loads.

This makes images support WebP or AVIF format when you upload them in WordPress.
If your hosting server supports AVIF, an AVIF version is created automatically; if not, it falls back to WebP.
If it supports both, you can choose which format to use under "Settings" > "Media."

These formats are only applied to newly uploaded images.
For existing images, you can also use the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin.

Since wp-cli lets everyone do it themselves, I ran it via wp-cli.

wp media regenerate

I explained how to install wp-cli in this article.

This is built into core as of WordPress 6.5 and later, so you shouldn't need to enable it separately!

This is a feature for multilingual support.

This lets you dynamically prefetch or prerender specific URLs based on user interaction.

By default, it's configured to prerender a WordPress frontend URL when a user hovers their mouse over a link, but you can customize this under "Settings" > "Reading" > "Speculative Loading."

This is built to optimize the performance of embedded content like YouTube videos and TikTok. Specifically, it lazy-loads embeds so they only load once they appear on screen, improving performance by avoiding contention with other resources while the page loads. More optimizations are planned for the future.

This plugin also recommends installing and activating the "Optimization Detective" plugin. When that plugin is active, embeds that appear near the top of the screen are recorded based on visitor behavior, and lazy loading is not applied to those embeds — since lazy loading introduces delay that can hurt the user experience and the page's LCP score.

Additionally, when Optimization Detective is active, preconnect links are added for the network resources needed by popular embedded content (YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, Spotify, VideoPress, etc.), which speeds up loading.

This plugin has no settings or user interface — it's designed to work simply by installing it.

This experimentally enhances WordPress's responsive image feature. It currently provides the following:

1. Uses the theme's layout information to improve the accuracy of the sizes attribute.

2. Implements the new HTML spec that adds sizes=”auto” to lazy-loaded images.

This plugin also works together with the "Image Prioritizer" plugin. Once that plugin is enabled, it learns, based on real visitor data, which images sit below the fold (off-screen), and automatically adds loading=”lazy” to them. This plugin then also adds sizes=”auto” to those images, further improving lazy-loading performance.

This plugin has no settings or user interface — it's designed to work automatically just by installing it.

This optimizes the loading of images that make up the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) element, which affects page display speed. LCP elements include <img> tag images and CSS background images. Since a theme's responsive design can have different LCP elements at different screen sizes (breakpoints), preload links are added to identify and prioritize the LCP image for each breakpoint.