The WordPress Media Library

Use Meaningful File Names

Always give files relevant file names. This helps you find them later and helps Google and other search engines display them in image search results…driving more traffic to your site. Example: futuristic-office.jpg is better than IMG_1234.jpg

Optimize Your Images Prior To Uploading

Prepare files prior to uploading. I like 1400px wide and 250KB max. If I know the image will be the full width of the screen, I set it at 1920px wide and 300kb max. Smaller file sizes are event better…you want the image as small as possible without it being pixelated and blurry.

Adobe Photoshop is good paid software, and Fotor and ImageOptim are good free software for reducing and resizing images.

Alt Text And Title

Give every image an Alt Text and Title. This helps Google know what your images are, and thus helps your site get more visitors. It also helps with accessibility (important for disabled people).

Image Search

The Media Library’s search does a great job finding images with words contained in the File Name or the Title, so make sure you use relevant text, rather than meaningless text (e.g. black-dog-eating.jpg is better than IMG_00123b.jpg).

Migrating files from an old website or to a new site

There is not a simple way to move photos between sites. But the Export Media Library plugin lets you export your media library easily. Add that to your old site and export your images to your computer. Then you can upload them to your new site’s Media library.

Alternatively, you could ask your website host’s tech support to migrate your images to your new site’s Media Library folder (if the new site and the old site are both hosted by the same company). You can avoid the need to migrate by always storing images at an external location, such as Bunny.net (see below).

Storing Files Outside Your Site (e.g. Bunny.net CDN)

The need to export import images in the future can be negated by never adding any images to your media library. Instead you can add your files to a bunny.net account and simply provide the url of the image inside your site. This also keeps your site size small (because your site will hold fewer files), making backups quick and easy. Your images may get served faster too, as Bunny has a global CDN. 

The problem I’ve found is that I am not a fan of having to open Bunny and use their interface, whereas the WP Media Library I think is awesome, especially for searching for images based on the image file name or Title/Description. So I personally prefer to put my images in the Media Library and potentially deal with a somewhat complex migration of images every few years if needed…the main issue being that the new site needs to maintain the same links to the images, so those images need to have the same name AND relative location in the new site’s Media Library.

What About Large Files Like PDF and Video?

I never add video to my WP Media Library. The files are large and suck up huge amount of server resources to stream them. The solution is to add your videos to Vimeo or YouTube and then simply embed them into your webpages.

You could add PDF’s to your Media Library, but I suggest you add these to Bunny.net (or your favorite CDN software). I do this because these files are large, and unlike images, there is a low chance I will want to be searching for them or ever referring to them in the future, so I don’t need a user-friendly interface like the Media Library.

I upload the PDF to Bunny.net, copy it’s URL then I store that URL in an Airtable database that has all my info about the webpage where I am embedding or providing that PDF (I always keep track of any webpages I create in a dedicated Airtable database, and I encourage you to as well). Need Airtable help? Visit the Zero2Webmaster Airtable page.