Cimo: The Future Of Image Compression

In February of 2025 I did a post about why you should use WebP for your website images. I think AVIF has its place, but WebP still has the widest feature set for the filesize.

One of the problems with that is that most cameras provide images in JPG, or a lossless format that isn’t proper for the web, so you have to manually convert it. Another option is to install a plugin that does it for you after upload. Both of these options have some kind of drawback.

Converting image formats manually can be time consuming. Using a plugin to do it after upload has several drawbacks:

• You’re still uploading an image with a very large file size.
• Once it’s uploaded something has to convert it. If it’s your server then it’s churning your processor. If it’s a remote service then your image is sent someplace across the internet, processed, and then sent back. This takes time, and often costs money.
• You’re probably keeping an original of that Very Large Image in case you need to reprocess it. Over time this can take up quite a bit of drive space.

So what to do? This is where Cimo comes in.

Enter Cimo

The other day I was reading an excellent newsletter put out by my friend Remkus. In it he mentioned a new image compression plugin for WordPress called Cimo.

The thing that makes Cimo amazing, and different from every other image compression plugin, is that it does all the work in the browser, before the image is uploaded. It converts it to WebP, and then uploads that. Here are some of the advantages:

• The image you upload is the tiny WebP, so it uploads MUCH faster.
• No extra image work is done on the server. No processor churning, no service in use, so your image is available after upload much more quickly.
• As far as WordPress is concerned, you’re simply uploading a WebP, so it’s as compatible with anything that uses the Media Library.
• No large original JPGs left to fill up your hosting drive space.
• There are no settings. It simply works.
• It’s completely free!

What it doesn’t help

Cimo doesn’t do anything at all about images already on your server. If you have a media library full of giant images, or even images where only the original is a JPG, you’ll still need a compression plugin to process those and fix them. Cimo is for the future, stemming the flow of large images in the future.

The future

As more plugins like Cimo appear and expand in capability, I think server side processing is going to fade away. If you upload the proper image in the first place, you don’t need to “fix” it.

I’ve dealt with many many clients over the years who are running out of drive space on their WordPress hosting simply because they have so many enormous image files. I think plugins like Cimo can help reduce that problem by several orders of magnitude.

I’ve spoken with Benjamin, the author, a little bit, but I think we’re at the beginning of long conversations about this. I’ve put in my request for AVIF support, but honestly I have NO idea how the code for this plugin works. We’ll see what happen!

Get it!

If you’re using WordPress, simply go to Add Plugins and search for Cimo. Install and activate it and it magically starts working.

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