Softminal Admin

Category: General

  • How to Serve WebP Images in WordPress (Without Touching Your Originals)

    How to Serve WebP Images in WordPress (Without Touching Your Originals)

    Run your site through PageSpeed Insights. Chances are, somewhere in the results, you will see the line: “Serve images in next-gen formats.” It has probably been there for a while. You have probably ignored it.

    That is fair. The suggestion sounds simple, but the actual work never felt safe. Most WebP plugins want to rewrite your URLs, replace your originals, or route your images through someone else’s server. Any of those can break things in ways that are hard to undo — a CDN stops serving the right file, an old embed points at nothing, a plugin you forgot about caches the wrong URL. So you leave the suggestion there and move on.

    But the cost of ignoring it adds up. A JPEG from 2024 weighs 200–800 KB. A site with a hundred images is shipping tens of megabytes in a format from 1992. WebP cuts 25–35% off that weight with no visible quality loss, and every major browser has supported it for years. That is real bandwidth, real load time, and a real Core Web Vitals score sitting on the table.

    ImageCraft handles the conversion without any of the risk. It creates a WebP copy beside each original — photo.jpg gets a photo.jpg.webp in the same folder. Your original files stay exactly where they are, named exactly what they are named, with exactly the same URLs. On your public pages, a standard <picture> element lets the browser pick the WebP when it can, and the original when it can’t. Turn it off, and every page goes back to how it was.

    TL;DR

    • ImageCraft generates WebP copies of your images and serves them to browsers that support the format. Originals are the automatic fallback.
    • Your original files are never touched. The WebP copies sit beside them as sidecar files (photo.jpg.webp). Remove them anytime, and you are back to where you started.
    • Setup: go to ImageCraft → Performance → Next-gen Formats, turn on WebP and Serve next-gen images, then convert images from the Compress screen.
    • Delivery uses the HTML <picture> element. The browser picks the format. No .htaccess rules, no server config, no rewrite tricks.
    • Typical savings: 25–35% smaller files, no visible quality loss.
    • Free includes manual and bulk WebP conversion plus <picture> delivery. Pro adds AVIF, auto-convert on upload, and no daily limit.
    • It is off by default. Updating the plugin changes nothing until you turn it on.

    Why your images are bigger than they need to be

    JPEG is from 1992. PNG is from 1996. Both do their jobs, but their compression is showing its age. A 400 KB JPEG becomes a 260–300 KB WebP. A 1.2 MB PNG with transparency can drop to 400–600 KB. Same picture, same quality, fewer bytes.

    On a single blog post with six images, that saves 500 KB to 1 MB. On a WooCommerce category page with twenty thumbnails, you save several megabytes. Multiply that by your monthly traffic and you are talking about gigabytes of bandwidth — bandwidth your visitors are paying for with their time, and you might be paying for with your hosting bill.

    Google cares. Core Web Vitals measure how fast your largest visible content loads — Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP. On most pages, that content is an image. Smaller image, faster LCP, better search ranking. Google has been saying this since 2021, and they are the ones who built WebP in the first place.

    Browser support is not a concern anymore. Safari was the last holdout. It added WebP in 2022. As of mid-2026, over 97% of web traffic comes from browsers that handle WebP. The <picture> fallback covers the rest, so no visitor ever sees a broken image.

    How other plugins do it (and why you hesitated)

    If you have looked into WebP before, you probably ran into one of these approaches and thought “maybe later.”

    Cloud services send your images to someone else’s server, convert them there, and serve them back — sometimes from a CDN, sometimes as a replacement in your uploads folder. The conversion is fast, but your images pass through a third party. You pay per image or per month. And if that service disappears or has a bad day, your images are part of the problem.

    Rewrite plugins generate WebP files on your server, then use .htaccess or Nginx rules to swap the file the browser actually receives. When your server setup is standard, this works. When it is not — a reverse proxy, a CDN that ignores rewrite rules, a managed host with locked config — the swap silently fails. Your visitor gets the old JPEG, you think they are getting WebP, and nobody knows until you wonder why your scores haven’t changed.

    Replace-in-place plugins convert your originals directly. The JPEG becomes a WebP. This is efficient, but it is also permanent. If another plugin, a theme, or a CDN still expects the old file at the old URL, things break. And if you want to go back, you need a backup — if you made one.

    Each of these works for some people. But each asks you to trust something: a third party, a server config, or the idea that you will never want the original back. That trust is why a lot of people never flip the switch.

    How ImageCraft does it differently

    ImageCraft does not replace anything, rewrite anything, or send anything to an external server.

    Sidecar files

    When you convert an image, ImageCraft reads the original and writes a WebP version next to it. If the original is wp-content/uploads/2025/06/photo.jpg, the WebP is wp-content/uploads/2025/06/photo.jpg.webp. Same folder. Predictable name. It does this for the full-size image and for every size WordPress generated — thumbnails, medium, large, all of them.

    Your original file is not renamed. Not moved. Not deleted. Not re-encoded. The Media Library entry does not change. The URL does not change. Open your uploads folder and you see the same files as before, plus the .webp files sitting beside them.

    <picture> delivery

    On your public pages, ImageCraft wraps each <img> in a <picture> element:

    <!-- What your page normally outputs -->
<img src="photo.jpg" alt="A sunrise over the mountains">

<!-- What ImageCraft turns it into -->
<picture>
  <source type="image/webp" srcset="photo.jpg.webp">
  <img src="photo.jpg" alt="A sunrise over the mountains">
</picture>

    The browser reads this top to bottom. If it knows WebP, it grabs the <source>. If it doesn’t, it grabs the <img>. That is how the <picture> element was designed to work — standard HTML, not a hack. No JavaScript. No server-side browser sniffing. No .htaccess. It works behind any CDN, with any caching plugin, on any host.

    Never-bigger guard

    WebP does not always win. A tiny PNG or an already-optimized file can sometimes produce a WebP that is actually larger. ImageCraft checks: if the WebP is not smaller than the original, it throws it away and moves on. You never serve a file that is worse than what you had.

    One-click cleanup

    Every conversion is tracked in the image’s metadata. If you ever want to remove all the WebP files — all of them, at once — there is a Clean button. It removes the sidecar files and the metadata. Your originals, again, are not touched.

    Setup: turn it on, convert your library

    You do this once.

    1. Install or update ImageCraft from the WordPress plugin directory.
    2. Go to ImageCraft → Performance → Next-gen Formats.
    3. Turn on WebP. This tells ImageCraft you want to create WebP copies. It does not convert anything yet.
    4. Turn on Serve next-gen images. This enables the <picture> delivery on your public pages.
    5. Click save.

    That is it. Now you can start converting.

    If the toggle says “Not supported by server”: your host does not have the PHP extensions needed to create WebP files (Imagick with WebP support, or GD with imagewebp). Most modern WordPress hosts have this out of the box. If yours does not, contact them — it is usually a one-line configuration change on their side.

    Converting images to WebP

    From the Compress screen. Go to ImageCraft → Performance. Your images are listed with sizes and status. Select the ones you want and click Convert Selected. ImageCraft creates the WebP sidecar for each image and its sizes. Everything runs on your server. No files go anywhere.

    From the media modal. Open any image in the WordPress media modal — from the Media Library or from inside a post. The ImageCraft panel has a Convert button alongside Compress and Rename. One click, one image, done.

    Both paths do the same thing. The Compress screen is better for working through a backlog. The media modal is better when you are looking at a specific image right now.

    How your visitors get the smaller files

    Once an image has a WebP sidecar and delivery is on, there is nothing else to do. ImageCraft wraps each matching <img> in a <picture> element. The browser picks the smaller file. The original is always there as a fallback.

    • Only converted images get wrapped. If you have 500 images and you converted 200 of them, only those 200 get the <picture> treatment. The other 300 show up exactly as before.
    • It does not run in wp-admin. Your editor, your Media Library, your admin screens all show the originals. The WebP swap is for visitors only.
    • Caching plugins just work. The <picture> HTML caches like any other markup. WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed, WP Rocket — no special config.
    • CDNs just work. The browser decides the format, not the server. No CDN-side rules needed.

    Bulk convert: do the whole library at once

    One at a time is fine for a handful of photos. If you have hundreds, you want the bulk route.

    ImageCraft Compress screen with the Convert Selected button highlighted and several images selected

    1. Go to ImageCraft → Performance (the Compress screen).
    2. A scan shows how many images can be converted and how many already have been.
    3. Select what you want, or hit Select All.
    4. Click Convert Selected.

    The batch runs in the background with a progress bar. You can close the browser and come back later — the job keeps going. Images already converted are skipped. Images where the WebP would be larger are skipped too.

    How long does it take? Depends on your server and the number of images. On a typical shared host, roughly 1–3 seconds per image. A 500-image library takes maybe 10–25 minutes. You are only doing this once.

    Tip: If you already compressed your images with ImageCraft, the WebP conversion works from the compressed files. Compression reduces the image data — strips metadata, optimizes encoding. WebP uses a more efficient format on top of that. The savings stack.

    Will this slow down my site?

    The opposite. Your pages will load faster. The conversion is a one-time job. Once a WebP sidecar exists, it is just a file on disk. Serving it adds nothing to your page load — the <picture> wrapper is built once when WordPress renders the page, and after that it is static HTML.

    The files themselves are smaller, so every image loads faster. Pages with lots of images — blog archives, product category pages, portfolio grids — see the biggest difference, because the savings stack across every image in the layout.

    What about AVIF?

    AVIF goes further than WebP. It usually produces files 20–30% smaller than WebP, which means 40–50% smaller than the original JPEG. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all support it now, though not as universally as WebP yet.

    ImageCraft handles AVIF the same way — sidecar files, <picture> delivery, never-bigger guard, one-click cleanup. The <picture> element offers AVIF first, then WebP, then the original. The browser picks the best it can handle.

    The catch is on the server side. AVIF encoding needs either PHP 8.1+ with GD’s imageavif(), or Imagick with an AVIF delegate. A lot of WordPress hosts do not have this yet. If yours does not, ImageCraft says “Not supported by server” on the AVIF toggle — no guessing, no cryptic error.

    AVIF is a Pro feature. If your server supports it, Pro unlocks the toggle.

    Free vs Pro

    FreePro
    WebP conversionManual single + bulkManual + auto on upload
    WebP deliveryYesYes
    AVIF—Yes (where server supports it)
    Daily limit50 actions / 24 hours (shared with compression and alt text)Unlimited
    Auto-convert on upload—Yes

    Frequently asked questions

    Does this change my original images?

    No. Your originals are never modified, renamed, or deleted. The WebP files are separate copies sitting next to them. Turn the feature off and your pages serve the originals as if nothing happened.

    What if I turn off delivery?

    The <picture> wrappers disappear from your pages. Every <img> renders as it did before. The WebP files stay on disk but nothing uses them.

    Can I remove all the WebP files at once?

    Yes. The Clean button removes every sidecar file and its tracking metadata. Your originals stay.

    Does it work with my CDN?

    Yes. The browser picks the format using the <picture> element — the server and CDN are not involved in that decision. No CDN configuration needed.

    Does it work with caching plugins?

    Yes. The <picture> HTML is page-level markup, cached like everything else. No special setup.

    Will old browsers see broken images?

    No. A browser that does not understand <picture> ignores it and loads the <img> inside. A browser that understands <picture> but not WebP skips the <source> and loads the <img>. Either way, the visitor sees an image.

    Is the conversion done locally?

    Yes. Everything runs on your WordPress server using PHP’s image libraries — Imagick or GD. Nothing is sent to an external service.

    How much disk space do the WebP files use?

    Less than the originals they were made from. Worst case, your uploads folder grows by roughly 65–75% of the originals’ combined size. For most sites that is a few hundred MB.

    I already compressed my images. Should I also do WebP?

    Yes. They work together. Compression reduces the image data. WebP uses a more efficient format to encode it. You get both savings stacked.

    Does this help my SEO?

    Yes. Smaller images load faster, which improves Largest Contentful Paint — a direct Google ranking signal. Your alt text, dimensions, and other image attributes are unaffected.

    Do I need an API key for this?

    No. WebP conversion has nothing to do with the AI features. You can use ImageCraft purely for WebP without ever adding a key.

    I updated the plugin — did anything change on my site?

    No. Next-gen Formats is off by default. Nothing changes until you turn it on.

    Get started

    You have probably seen “Serve images in next-gen formats” on your PageSpeed report more than once. The reason it stays there, for most sites, is not that WebP is complicated. It is that the path to get there felt like it might break something.

    ImageCraft takes the risk out of it. Your originals never move. WebP copies sit beside them, and a standard <picture> element lets the browser pick the smaller file. No URL changes, no server rules, no third-party service. Turn it off and your site is exactly what it was before.

    Open ImageCraft → Performance → Next-gen Formats, turn on WebP and Serve next-gen images, save, then go to the Compress screen and bulk-convert your library. Five minutes, and every image on your site gets lighter without a single original being touched.

    Ready to serve smaller, faster images? Get ImageCraft →

  • Introducing B2B Suite for WooCommerce: real B2B, not just wholesale pricing

    Introducing B2B Suite for WooCommerce: real B2B, not just wholesale pricing

    Most WooCommerce stores that sell to businesses started life selling to people. Somewhere along the way a wholesale customer showed up, then a distributor, then a buyer who wanted to pay on 30-day terms — and the store got stretched to fit them. You installed a wholesale-pricing plugin, built a few discount tables, and hoped the rest sorted itself out.

    It rarely does. Because real B2B isn’t a discount. It’s a relationship.

    A B2B buyer represents a company, not just an email address. Several people from that company might place orders, and someone senior wants to approve the big ones. They expect to pay on terms, not up front. They ask for a quote before they commit. They come back every month and reorder the same forty SKUs. None of that is “10% off for wholesale customers” — and none of it fits neatly into a shop that was designed for a one-time consumer checkout.

    That gap is why we built B2B Suite for WooCommerce: one plugin for the whole trade channel, not just the price tag on it. This post introduces what it does, the thinking behind it, and how the free plugin and Pro fit together.

    TL;DR

    • B2B Suite is one plugin for the whole B2B channel on WooCommerce — group and wholesale pricing, hidden prices, trade registration and approval, company accounts, net terms and credit, and request-a-quote. Not five plugins stitched together.
    • Real B2B is more than a discount: it’s companies, terms, quotes and approvals. A wholesale-pricing plugin only solves the smallest part of it.
    • Every trade price runs through a single pipeline with a full audit trail — the price a buyer sees in the shop is the price in their cart, in the Store API, and in the explanation you can pull up when they ask why.
    • The core plugin is free on WordPress.org, and it’s genuinely useful: a complete single-group wholesale channel with pricing control, hidden prices, trade registration, quantity rules, the bulk order form, PDF invoices, and an importer.
    • Pro adds the organisational depth — unlimited customer groups, company accounts and sub-users, net terms and credit, quoting, category/tag/per-customer pricing, tax exemption and EU VAT validation, and outbound webhooks.
    • It’s built to sit properly inside modern WooCommerce: HPOS-ready, tested on classic checkout and Cart & Checkout Blocks, fast on big catalogues, with all B2B data in its own indexed tables — never scattered across postmeta.
    • We’re launching soon on WordPress.org. Join the waitlist and we’ll email you the day it’s live.

    Why “wholesale pricing” isn’t B2B

    If you search for “WooCommerce B2B,” most of what you’ll find is really wholesale pricing: a plugin that lets you set a lower price for customers in a “wholesale” role. That’s useful, and B2B Suite does it well — but on its own it answers maybe a quarter of what a trade store actually needs.

    Here’s what a real B2B relationship asks for that a price rule can’t provide:

    A company, not a person. Your customer isn’t Jane; it’s Holloway Trade, and Jane is one of four people there who place orders. They should share an order history, a set of agreed prices, and — often — a shared credit account. When the new purchasing assistant joins, they shouldn’t have to create a personal account and start from zero.

    Approvals before money moves. In most businesses, a junior buyer can build an order but someone senior signs it off past a certain size. If your store can’t model that, the buyer either can’t use it or routes around it — and you lose the order to a phone call.

    Payment on terms. B2B runs on invoices and net-30, not “enter your card now.” A store that can’t offer terms is asking trade buyers to behave like consumers, and they won’t.

    A quote before the order. For anything negotiated — volume, freight, a special line — the buyer wants a quote first. Email threads and spreadsheets are how most stores handle this, and it’s where orders go to die.

    Prices that are gated and explainable. Trade prices are often private. You want to hide them from the public, show them only to approved accounts, and be able to explain exactly why a given buyer pays a given price when they ask.

    None of these is a discount. Each one is a piece of infrastructure. Bolt five separate plugins together to cover them and you get conflicting price filters, duplicated customer data, and a checkout that behaves differently depending on which plugin got there first. That’s the problem B2B Suite is designed to remove.

    What B2B Suite actually is

    B2B Suite is a single plugin that treats the B2B channel as one system instead of a pile of add-ons. It sits on top of standard WooCommerce — your products, your checkout, your orders — and adds the layer that trade customers need, without asking you to change how the rest of your store works.

    The design goal was simple: the parts of B2B that usually take five plugins and a developer should take one plugin and an afternoon. Everything shares the same data model and the same pricing pipeline, so the features actually cooperate instead of stepping on each other.

    The pieces of a real B2B store

    Here’s what’s in the box, and the job each part does.

    Group and wholesale pricing. Put customers into groups and price for each one — percentage off, a fixed amount off, or a set price. Apply it shop-wide, per product, per category, or right down to a single customer. This is the wholesale-pricing part, done properly and without a second plugin.

    Hidden prices and trade registration. Hide prices (and optionally the “add to cart” button, or whole products) from the public, so only approved trade accounts see them. Take real trade applications with the fields you care about, and approve accounts before anyone sees a number.

    Company accounts. One buying organisation, many people. Sub-users with roles, a shared order history, spend limits, and an approval chain so an order can be reviewed before it’s placed. The company is the customer; the people are how it buys.

    Net terms and credit. Sell on invoice. Set a credit limit per company, track what’s outstanding against a real ledger rather than a spreadsheet, and issue statements. The buyer checks out on terms; you keep control of the exposure.

    Request a quote. A quote basket, a negotiation thread, and per-line prices — then one click turns the agreed quote into a real WooCommerce order at exactly the agreed numbers. No re-keying, no drift.

    Bulk ordering. A fast order pad and quick order by SKU or pasted CSV, so a buyer reordering fifty lines doesn’t have to hunt through your catalogue one product at a time. It’s the feature repeat buyers notice first.

    Tax handling for trade. Tax-exempt customers, and — for EU stores — automatic VAT-number validation and reverse charge, so cross-border trade orders are correct without manual checking.

    One resolver, one audit trail

    Here’s the piece we care about most, because it’s the one that quietly breaks on stores that grew by stacking plugins.

    In B2B Suite, every trade price is decided by a single resolver. When a buyer looks at a product, one pipeline walks through the possibilities in a fixed order — an accepted quote, then a customer-specific rule, then their company, then their group, then a category rule, then any sale price, then the regular price — and the first one that applies wins. That same walk runs everywhere a price is shown: the shop, the cart, the Store API that Checkout Blocks uses, and the explainer.

    Two things fall out of that design:

    The price is consistent. Because one resolver answers every surface, the price a buyer sees on the product page is the price in their cart and the price at checkout. There’s no second plugin applying a different rule further down the line.

    The price is explainable. You can pull up exactly why a given buyer pays a given number — which rule won, and which rules were considered and skipped — because the explanation is generated from the same walk that charges the customer. It can’t drift from what they actually pay. When a buyer emails “why is this $68.40?”, you have a real answer instead of a guess.

    That’s the difference between a bag of price filters and a pricing engine: one pipeline decides the price, everywhere, and can always show its work.

    Free vs Pro: where the line is

    The core plugin is free on WordPress.org, and it isn’t a crippled trial. The free version runs a complete single-group wholesale channel end to end:

    • One customer group with full pricing control (percentage, amount-off, fixed), shop-wide and per product
    • Quantity-break pricing and buy-one-get-one on the same product
    • Hidden prices, trade registration and approval
    • The bulk order form and quick order by SKU or CSV
    • Min/max/pack quantity rules per product
    • PDF invoices, the price explainer, and an importer to bring rules over from other plugins
    • HPOS, Cart & Checkout Blocks, and a clean uninstall

    Pro is an add-on for when your buyers need organisational depth:

    • Unlimited customer groups, plus category, tag and per-customer price rules
    • Private catalogues and per-group visibility
    • Company accounts, sub-users, spend limits and order-approval chains
    • Net terms, credit limits and statements
    • Request a quote, end to end
    • Tax exemption and EU VIES VAT validation
    • Outbound webhooks and more

    Same database, same pricing pipeline. Install free first, add Pro when you need it, and nothing you configured gets thrown away.

    Built for real WooCommerce stores

    A B2B plugin lives at the checkout, which is the least forgiving part of a store. So B2B Suite is built to sit inside modern WooCommerce properly, not fight it:

    • HPOS-ready and tested against both the classic checkout and Cart & Checkout Blocks, including the Store API.
    • Fast on large catalogues — B2B data lives in its own indexed tables, never smeared across postmeta, so pricing stays quick as your catalogue and customer list grow.
    • Translation- and currency-aware, so rules follow WPML/Polylang and multi-currency setups.
    • Clean uninstall — remove it and it takes its own data with it, without leaving orphaned rows behind.

    Boring-sounding things, all of them. They’re also the things that decide whether a plugin is safe to run on a store that’s actually taking money.

    What this blog will cover

    This is the first post, so treat it as the introduction. From here, we’ll write about the parts of B2B on WooCommerce that actually trip stores up — the specific, unglamorous problems, and how to solve them:

    • Getting wholesale-pricing precedence right, so the correct rule wins and you can prove it
    • Running trade registration without drowning in spam applications
    • Setting up net terms you can actually collect on
    • Migrating from another B2B plugin without losing your groups and rules
    • Making company accounts and approval chains match how a real purchasing team works

    Practical, specific, and grounded in how the plugin really behaves — not a feature list dressed up as advice.

    FAQ

    Is B2B Suite free, or is it a trial?

    The core plugin is genuinely free on WordPress.org — not a time-limited trial. It runs a complete single-group wholesale channel on its own. Pro is a separate add-on for stores that need multiple groups, company accounts, credit, or quoting.

    Do I need the free plugin to use Pro?

    Yes. Pro is an add-on: the free plugin owns the database schema and the pricing pipeline, and Pro layers company accounts, credit, quoting and the rest on top. Install free first, then activate Pro.

    Will it work with my checkout?

    Both. B2B Suite is tested on the classic checkout and on Cart & Checkout Blocks, and it’s HPOS-ready, so it works whether you’re on the newer block checkout or the classic one.

    Can it replace the B2B plugin I’m already using?

    That’s the plan. The importer (in the free plugin, not behind the paywall) brings your customer groups and price rules over from other B2B plugins so switching doesn’t cost you the setup you’ve already done.

    When can I get it?

    B2B Suite is in the final stretch before it lands on WordPress.org. Join the waitlist at b2bsuitewp.com and we’ll email you the day it goes live.

    Conclusion

    Selling to businesses on WooCommerce shouldn’t mean gluing five plugins together and hoping they agree with each other at checkout. It should mean one system that understands companies, terms, quotes and approvals — and resolves every price through one pipeline you can actually explain.

    That’s what we’re building B2B Suite to be. The free plugin gives you a complete wholesale channel today; Pro adds the organisational depth when your buyers need it.

    We’re launching soon. Join the waitlist and we’ll tell you the moment it’s live — one email, then you decide. Real B2B deserves better than a discount table. Let’s build it.

  • Spectra Image Block: How to Add AI Alt Text, SEO File Names

    Spectra Image Block: How to Add AI Alt Text, SEO File Names

    A Spectra layout can look flawless and still quietly hurt your SEO and accessibility. Every Image block you place pulls from your media library — and if those images have empty alt text and file names like IMG_4521.jpg, search engines and screen readers see every flaw the editor hides. ImageCraft fixes that at the source.

    Why Spectra and ImageCraft work so well together

    The Spectra Image block doesn’t store its own copy of an image — it references an attachment in your WordPress media library and pulls that image’s alt text and file URL from there. ImageCraft works at exactly that level. So you don’t optimize images inside Spectra; you optimize them once in the media library, and every Spectra block using that image inherits the result automatically.

    Optimize an image once with ImageCraft, and every Spectra Image block that uses it gets accessible alt text and an SEO-friendly file name — with no block re-editing.

    Method 1: Optimize first, then insert into Spectra (recommended)

    This is the cleanest workflow for any new page or post — get the image right in the media library, then build your Spectra layout on top of polished assets.

    1. Upload your image to the media library.
    2. Turn on auto-generate alt text. In ImageCraft → Settings → Alt Text, enable Auto-generate on upload so every new upload gets AI alt text automatically.
    3. Rename the file for SEO. In ImageCraft → Scanner, click Rename to turn DSC_0099.jpg into something like red-leather-handbag.jpg — safely updating the file and its URL.
    4. Add the Spectra Image block and select your optimized image. The alt text and clean file name come along automatically.

    Prefer a particular wording? In Settings → Alt Text you can pick a tone (Professional, SEO, Casual, Technical) and a max length — and the Spectra block displays whatever alt text ImageCraft saved.

    Method 2: Already built the page? Fix existing images in bulk

    If your Spectra blocks are already live with missing or weak alt text, you don’t need to touch the blocks at all. Because they reference the media library, fixing the image there updates the block automatically.

    1. Open ImageCraft → Scanner — it flags every image with missing or generic alt text, including the ones used in your Spectra blocks.
    2. Select the images (or Select All) and click Generate.
    3. Review the AI suggestions and Accept them in bulk.
    4. Reload your page — the Spectra Image blocks now show the new alt text, with no block re-editing.

    For very large libraries, use the Batch screen — it processes hundreds of images in the background, so you can fix an entire site’s worth of Spectra images in one run.

    Frequently asked questions

    Does ImageCraft change the Spectra block itself?

    No. ImageCraft only optimizes the underlying media library attachment — its alt text and file name. The Spectra Image block simply reflects those values when it renders, so there’s nothing to re-edit inside Spectra.

    Will renaming a file break the image in my Spectra block?

    No. ImageCraft updates the attachment’s file and URL references safely, so your Spectra block keeps pointing at the correct new URL.

    Do I need to re-insert images after generating alt text?

    No. Spectra reads alt text live from the attachment, so accepting AI alt text in ImageCraft updates what the block outputs automatically.

    Does this work with Spectra galleries too?

    Yes. Any block that pulls from the media library — Spectra’s Image and gallery blocks included — benefits from the optimized attachments.

    Get started

    ImageCraft is free to install and works alongside Spectra, Gutenberg, Kadence, WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, and FileBird. Optimize your images once in the media library, build your Spectra layout on top, and every Image block ships SEO-ready — without writing a single line of alt text by hand.

    Ready to make every Spectra image count? Get ImageCraft →

  • Meet ImageCraft: AI Alt Text, File Renaming & Image SEO for WordPress

    Meet ImageCraft: AI Alt Text, File Renaming & Image SEO for WordPress

    Images make your WordPress site beautiful — but to search engines and screen readers, an image without alt text is invisible. Writing descriptive alt text for hundreds of images by hand is the kind of task everyone knows they should do and almost nobody finishes. ImageCraft fixes that with AI.

    What is ImageCraft?

    ImageCraft is a free, open-source WordPress plugin that generates accurate, human-quality alt text for your images using AI — then takes it further with SEO-friendly file renaming and a full image-SEO audit. It works with the new WordPress 7.0 native AI Client, or you can bring your own Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT-4o, or Google Gemini API key.

    The plugin itself is completely free. If you bring your own key, you only ever pay your AI provider directly — there’s no middleman.

    Why alt text matters

    Alt text does double duty. For accessibility, it’s how screen-reader users understand your visuals — and in many regions it’s a legal requirement. For SEO, it’s how Google understands your images, powering image-search traffic and reinforcing the relevance of the page they live on. Missing or generic alt text (“image1.jpg”, “DSC_0042”) quietly costs you both.

    What ImageCraft does

    AI alt text in 65+ languages

    Generate natural, descriptive alt text in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, Tamil, Korean, and 55+ more — with 7 tone options (Professional, Casual, Technical, SEO, and three WooCommerce-specific tones), or your own custom prompt.

    Media library scanner & SEO audit

    Scan your entire media library with smart filters — date range, file size, alt-text quality, and missing or generic-alt detection. The SEO Audit Dashboard shows exactly how many images need attention and suggests fixes.

    Batch processing & auto-generate on upload

    Fix a backlog of hundreds of images in a single run with chunked processing and live progress tracking. Going forward, ImageCraft can auto-generate alt text in the background every time you upload — with an optional preview before it’s accepted.

    SEO file renaming

    Beyond alt text, ImageCraft can rename the underlying image files based on the generated description, so DSC_0042.jpg becomes something search engines can actually read.

    WooCommerce-aware

    For stores, ImageCraft generates alt text for product featured images and galleries using context-aware prompts that include the product name, category, and SKU — turning your catalog images into a search asset.

    Built to be safe and simple

    Your API keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-CBC and stored in your own database. Nothing is sent to third parties except the AI provider you choose. A guided setup wizard gets you running in minutes: pick a provider, paste your key, and start generating — then track daily usage, acceptance rates, and estimated costs from the Usage Statistics panel.

    Get started

    ImageCraft is free to install and works alongside Yoast SEO, Rank Math, AIOSEO, SEOPress, WooCommerce, Gutenberg, Kadence, Spectra, and FileBird. Install it, run a media-library scan, and watch your accessibility and image-SEO scores climb — without writing a single line of alt text by hand.

    Ready to make every image count? Get ImageCraft →