WordPress Imagick: What Is It and How to Enable It?

ImageMagick or Imagick is one of the libraries used by WordPress to optimize the images on your site. However, by producing high-quality images, they can also increase the size of your image files. This can slow down your site and result in a poor user experience. So, how to handle WordPress Imagick correctly?

Long story short, you can enable WordPress Imagick with this easy-to-use plugin. Then, you can be sure WordPress uses Imagick (over other image libraries) every time. Meanwhile, you can configure your WordPress Imagick settings to prioritize quality or size to speed up your loading times.

Introduction to WordPress Imagick

You might not know that when you upload a new image to WordPress, the platform automatically optimizes the image for you. To do this, WordPress relies on two PHP libraries:

1.  GD Library
2.  Imagick (a PHP extension that uses Image Magick)

They are both PHP modules that are already installed on your server (on most hosts).

Anyone can use the GD library and Imagick to resize, crop, compress, and optimize images. Additionally, you can use them to change the contrast of images, increase brightness, and add text overlays to your pictures.

Although these libraries work similarly, WordPress generally prefers to use Imagick over the GD library if both modules are installed on your server (As of WordPress 3.5,

This is because Imagick supports a lot of image formats and usually results in a higher-quality image.

Why configure WordPress Imagick on your site

As long as your hosting server has the Imagick module installed (which almost all WordPress hosts will do), WordPress may already be using Imagick to optimize your site’s images.

That is, you don’t need to do anything just enable WordPress Imagick optimization (Assuming the module is already installed on your server,

However, you might want to customize how Imagick optimizes your images, either to use a more aggressive optimization (which may reduce the image quality to some extent) or to use less optimization (which will produce high-quality images, but at the expense of file size,

For example, if you run a photography website, you may want to adjust the WordPress Imagick settings to ensure that you are not compromising on the quality of your portfolio images.

Luckily, you can use plugins to customize WordPress Imagick settings according to your preferences. Then, you can choose whether you want WordPress to prioritize speed or quality.

How to Enable WordPress Imagick (3 Steps)

Now, let us see how to enable WordPress Imagick and configure the way the library manages your images.

Step 1: Install and Activate ImageMagick Engine

The simplest way to enable and configure WordPress Imagick is to use a free WordPress plugin like ImageMagick Engine.

With this plugin, you can instruct WordPress to use Imagick every time the GD library is called.

Better yet, you can customize different image sizes for speed or quality, making it ideal for a wide variety of website owners. This is also a great solution if Imagick is not currently activated on your server as you can easily enable it.

The plugin is completely free, so you can go ahead and activate it directly in your WordPress dashboard. On successful activation, navigate to Adjustment , ImageMagick engine,

Here, you may receive a message that the ImageMagick Engine is not enabled. If so, all you have to do is tick the box where it says enable advanced image engine, Now click on Save Changes,

Step 2: Customize WordPress Imagick Settings

Now that you’ve activated the ImageMagick Engine, you can customize the plugin’s settings. scroll down to customize for section. Here, you will see all the different image formats supported by WordPress:

This is where you can set whether you want WordPress Imagick to focus on image size or quality for each image type.

For example, you might want to change the way Imagick handles all the thumbnails on your site. if you check the Shape box, this will result in a much smaller file size, but will also produce a lower-quality image. However, this drop in quality may not be very noticeable because thumbnails are very small images anyway.

But, for larger images, it may be more beneficial to display a sharp, clear image because they are more easily visible. so in addition Bigyou can choose quality,

Additionally, you can try different size and quality settings in ImageMagick Quality Section:

Just enter a number between 0 and 100 and optimize for quality this customize to size boxes. It is important to note that a high value in optimizing for quality boxes can result in a large image file.

If you’re not sure what you want to achieve yet, you can leave the box blank and ImageMagick will determine it automatically. Now click on Save Changes To update your WordPress Imagick settings.

Step 3: Apply Your WordPress Imagick Settings to Existing Images 🖼️

At this point, the ImageMagick Engine plugin will only apply your configured WordPress Imagick settings to new images you upload. However, you may want to apply the Imagick settings to existing images on your site.

To do this, you will need to recreate your existing images. you can do it by visiting Adjustment, ImageMagick engine, then, go to reproduce images Sections on the right side of your screen:

Here, check all the image types you want your ImageMagick setting to apply to. Then click on regenerate, Now, all images on your site will adhere to your specific WordPress imagery requirements.

Seeing an “ImageMagick PHP module not found” message?

If you see the message “ImageMagick PHP module not found” next to Imagic PHP Module line in the plugin’s settings, it means that the Imagick module is not installed on your server.

Unfortunately, fixing this is a bit tricky.

If you are using a WordPress hosting provider, we recommend contacting them for support and seeing if they can install the module for you.

Otherwise, you’ll need to feel comfortable connecting to your server via SSH and installing modules using commands. Usually, it’s something like sudo apt-get install php-imagick,

Get More Control Over WordPress Imagick

Therefore, it is a good idea to enable WordPress Imagick and optimize the settings to improve the performance of your website.

To recap, here are the three steps to enable WordPress Imagick: