Martin Anderson-Clutz

Senior Solutions Engineer

Currently based in London, Ontario, Canada, Martin grew up in Montreal and lived for a time in Toronto. Martin began his career as a graphic designer, but was soon drawn web design. His ambition for creating compelling online experiences drew him to deeper and deeper explorations into the underlying technologies. After working with a custom content management system (CMS), in late 2005 Martin started using the Drupal CMS and found it powerful and easy to work with. He began attending meetings of Drupal User Groups in Toronto and Waterloo, Ontario, eventually starting a group in London. Currently employed as a Sr. Solutions Architect at Acquia, Martin is an Acquia Triple Certified Drupal developer for Drupal 7, 8, and 9, as well being certified for a variety of other Acquia products, in addition to being UX certified by the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group.

Image Optimization in Acquia Cloud

Last updated June 8, 2022
1 minute read

Goal

Implement image optimization best practices so your site can serve images at the smallest possible file size

Overview

Optimizing the images on your website is crucial for performance, and in turn, User Experience, SEO, and more generally, the success of your site. The good news is that the Acquia Cloud Platform has built-in capabilities to help your site serve great-looking images that load quickly.

Let's break down the steps needed to put these capabilities to use:

Use the Built-in Utilities

Among the supported software you can use on Acquia Cloud, are ready-to-use versions of PngCrush and JpegTran. We also recommend using the installed ImageMagick library instead of the Drupal default GD library, which is installed by default in most LAMP stacks. The main benefit of Imagemagick is that unlike GD, it doesn’t use Apache’s processes, and puts a lower demand on server resources. To make this change, install the ImageMagick module and then update the setting at /admin/config/media/image-toolkit in your site to use it:
Set Up Image Optimize

To optimize your images with the locally available versions of PngCrush and JpegTran, install the Image Optimize and Image Optimize Binaries modules. At /admin/config/media/imageapi-optimize-pipelines of your site create a new pipeline, and add the PngCrush and JpegTran processors:
Configure JpegTran

Note that for JpegTran, it’s recommended to force the creation of jpeg files as progressive, which can be done with a simple checkbox:
Set Your Pipeline As Default

After you’re done, set your new pipeline as the sitewide default if you want to use it everywhere, otherwise you can manually choose a specific pipeline in the settings for any image style.
Add WebP Support

You can also allow this pipeline to create processed images as webp with a jpeg format by adding the WebP processor. Note that this will only apply as part of responsive images, where a <scrset> tag will be created to provide the webp images. To implement that here, install the WebP module, and add and configure the processor to your Image Optimize pipeline:

In particular you’ll likely want to set the image quality lower than the default of 100.
Profit!

By following the steps above, Drupal is now able to generate a variety of image variants to provide an optimized experience for visitors across a variety of browsers and screen sizes, all from a single uploaded image: