WordPress plugins we love – Imsanity

Sometimes the simplest tools are the best, and the Imsanity plugin is a stellar example of this. The plugin tackles one particular WordPress challenge and excels at it. Don’t just take my word for it either, the plugin has a near perfect 4.9/5.0 rating and 200,000 installs. No mean feat.

Imsanity (Image Sanity, get it?) tries to remove some of the frustration from uploading images to your WordPress website, especially when you have multiple end users who might not appreciate the impact of file sizes and file types on your hosting account storage and site loading times for visitors.

Imsanity works seamlessly in the background, processing every image uploaded to your WordPress website through the WordPress interface (note: it doesn’t affect FTP uploads). Imsanity can be configured to resize images on the fly, and also convert inefficient file types like BMP and PNG to JPG.

The plugin defaults to auto resizing images to 2048×1024, but I personally switch that to 1024×768 on installation. I find that’s usually a large enough resolution for any of my regular website needs. You can customize that more granularly if you need to set different limits for site design elements versus regular posts and pages:

As you can see in the screenshot above you can also optional enable the conversion of file types, plus define the quality of the JPG files the plugin outputs.

The beauty of Imsanity is that once you’ve installed and configured it, it sits quietly in the background doing its job day in, day out without ever intruding. You’ll forget it’s even installed to be honest – which is as good as a recommendation as any!

A few other bonus points for the plugin include near flawless performance, regular updates and a relatively lightweight code base. All of the above means this gets a gold star from us and makes our WordPress plugins we love list.