Big News: Automatic Image Optimization is Now Available in Toocheke!

’m excited to announce a brand-new feature in the Toocheke Companion plugin that will help webcomic creators speed up their sites and save server space.

You can now automatically optimize images when they are uploaded, converting them to modern formats like AVIF or WebP. This means smaller file sizes, faster page loads, and a better reading experience for your audience.

For webcomics—where pages are often large images—this can make a huge difference in performance.

💥 What’s New in Toocheke Companion 1.209?

The latest version introduces Image Optimization on Upload, which:

• Automatically converts uploaded images to AVIF when supported by your server
• Falls back to WebP if AVIF isn’t available
• Reduces image file sizes significantly
• Saves valuable disk space on your server
• Helps comic pages load faster for readers

Modern formats like AVIF can compress images far more efficiently than traditional formats like JPEG or PNG while maintaining excellent visual quality.

⚡ Why Image Optimization Matters for Webcomic Sites

Webcomics typically rely on large, high-resolution images, which can quickly consume storage and slow down page loading times.

With this new feature enabled, Toocheke helps you:

• Deliver faster comic pages
• Improve reader experience
• Reduce bandwidth and storage usage
• Keep your comic archive optimized automatically

The best part? Once enabled, it works automatically whenever you upload a new image.

🛠️ How to Enable Image Optimization

Setting it up only takes a minute.

🚨 Important: Avoid Using Multiple Image Optimization Plugins
If you enable image optimization in Toocheke Companion, you should disable other image optimization plugins such as EWWW Image Optimizer or Smush.

Running multiple image optimizers at the same time can cause plugin conflicts, double compression, or images being converted repeatedly, which may reduce image quality or create unexpected behavior.

✅ Best practice: If you turn on Toocheke’s built-in optimizer, let it handle image optimization by itself.

1. In your WordPress admin area, go to:
   Toocheke → Options → Images
2. Check the box:
   “Do you want to optimize images?”
3. Set the image quality values:
   • AVIF Image Quality: 50 (recommended)
   • WebP Image Quality: 75 (recommended)
   These default values provide the best balance between visual quality and file size.
4. Click Save Changes

That’s it! 🎉

All new images you upload will now be automatically optimized.

⚠️ Important Tip About Image Quality

It may be tempting to increase the quality values, but higher numbers reduce compression efficiency.

• AVIF works best around 50–60
• WebP works best around 75–85

Setting the values too high reduces the benefits of optimization, meaning larger file sizes and slower page loads.

For most comics, the default values of 50 (AVIF) and 75 (WebP) will give you excellent results.

🙋‍♂️ Why I Added This Feature

Many comic creators host their work on shared hosting or VPS servers, where storage and bandwidth matter.

Since comic pages are often large images, optimizing them automatically can significantly reduce file sizes while keeping your artwork looking great.

This feature helps ensure that your comics load quickly and efficiently for readers around the world.

💬 Feedback Welcome

If you try the new image optimization feature, I’d love to hear how it works for your comic site.

Your feedback helps shape future improvements to Toocheke and the Companion plugin.

Thanks again for supporting Toocheke and being part of the community! 🖤

Happy Tooning!