Over the past decade, I’ve built WordPress websites for clients ranging from small businesses to large organizations. One issue has remained surprisingly consistent throughout those years: media files are often much larger than they need to be.
A few unoptimized images, PDFs, or videos can dramatically increase page load times, consume unnecessary storage, and make backups slower. While there are many optimization plugins available, I often found myself wanting something simpler, more transparent, and easier to extend.
That was the beginning of ImgPress.
Solving a Problem I Faced Repeatedly
Like many side projects, ImgPress didn’t start with a business plan.
It started because I was solving the same problem over and over again.
Every new WordPress project required almost the same checklist:
- Compress uploaded images
- Generate modern image formats when appropriate
- Optimize PDFs before storing them
- Reduce unnecessary storage usage
- Improve website performance without changing the user’s workflow
Instead of repeating the same scripts and custom integrations for every project, I decided to build a reusable solution that anyone could use.
Why Open Source?
I’m a strong believer that developers should contribute back whenever possible.
Throughout my career, I’ve benefited enormously from open-source software. WordPress itself, PHP, Composer, Laravel, and countless libraries have saved me thousands of hours.
ImgPress is my way of giving something back.
Making it open source also encourages:
- Transparency
- Community contributions
- Easier auditing
- Long-term maintainability
- Freedom for developers to customize it for their own projects
Rather than locking features behind a proprietary platform, I’d rather build something that developers can inspect, improve, and learn from.
More Than Image Compression
Although the name suggests image optimization, the vision behind ImgPress is much broader.
Modern websites don’t only upload JPEG or PNG files anymore.
They also manage:
- PDFs
- WebP images
- AVIF images
- Videos
- Audio files
- Documents
The long-term goal is to create a unified media optimization pipeline inside WordPress.
Instead of installing several plugins that each handle one file type, I’d like ImgPress to become a central place where media processing happens automatically and consistently.
Built for Developers
One principle guided every design decision:
Automate repetitive work without taking control away from developers.
Developers should still be able to choose:
- which media types to optimize
- which compression libraries to use
- when optimization should happen
- whether optimization runs immediately or in the background
Rather than being a “black box,” ImgPress aims to be flexible enough for different hosting environments and project requirements.
Learning Through Building
Every side project teaches something new.
Building ImgPress has pushed me to explore topics beyond traditional WordPress plugin development:
- media processing pipelines
- queue systems
- server performance
- background workers
- image conversion libraries
- storage optimization
- benchmarking compression algorithms
Those lessons often find their way back into my client work, making every project a little better than the last.
Looking Ahead
ImgPress is still evolving.
There are many features I’d like to add in the future, including:
- smarter background processing
- cloud storage integration
- batch optimization
- detailed compression reports
- developer-friendly APIs
- support for additional media formats
Like many open-source projects, it will continue to grow one iteration at a time.
The last
I don’t expect ImgPress to become the next major WordPress plugin overnight.
What I do hope is that it becomes genuinely useful; for developers who care about performance, for website owners who want to save storage, and for anyone who appreciates well-built open-source software.
If the project helps someone optimize their workflow, teaches another developer something new, or inspires someone to build their own open-source project, then it has already achieved more than I originally imagined.
After all, some of the best software doesn’t begin as a product.
It begins as a problem worth solving.