WordPress Plugin Of The Week: WP Retina 2x

This week’s ‘WordPress Plugin Of The Week’ is WP Retina 2x.

As you may have guessed from the title, this plugin has something to do with Retina displays – though if you’re shaking your head at this point, don’t panic, I’ll explain more further on.

WP Retina 2x is a nifty little plugin that simply converts the images on your WordPress site into images that will look beautifully clear on Retina screens, such as those on Apple’s iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro and iMac.

Simple, yet remarkably effective – we love WP Retina 2x, here’s why you need it in your life:

Retina who?

I could ramble on about a load of technical mumbo-jumbo for hours, but to save everyone time I will keep this short and sweet. ‘Retina’ is a marketing term coined by Apple to define their screens that have such a high pixel density that the human eye can’t differentiate between the individual pixels. There are other factors at play, such as viewing distance, however, in essence, Retina screens have smaller pixels and so are more compact, creating clear and crisp images.

Wait. There’s one problem

Screen X is a 13″ screen with retina display, it has a resolution of 2560×1600. Screen Y is a standard 13″ screen with a resolution of 1280×800. Clearly Screen X has more pixels in the same amount of space, therefore an image of 600×600 pixels will appear as a correct size on Screen Y but extremely small on Screen X. To solve this the image needs to be scaled and adjusted to look the right the size on a both screen.

WP Retina 2x to the rescue

This is a rather handy, little plugin that will convert all of the images on your WordPress site to make them ‘Retina ready’. This means your site will look damn awesome on Retina screens without loosing any of the image quality. Here’s just a few reasons why we love WP Retina 2x:

– Automatically generate a Retina image for every image on your site. (Or do it manually, if you want).

– It supports numerous methods to deliver the Retina images. You can find out more about this here. To put it simply, the developer has created a solution for everyone – what a nice guy!

– Multi-site compatible

– Fast, reliable and it works from the off, you don’t need to set anything up – unless you really want to.

Most of all, we love WP Retina 2x because it takes a particularly complicated process and makes it simple enough for everyone to use. Sure, it isn’t make or break if your images aren’t Retina compatible, but with the increasing popularity of Apple’s Retina devices and such a simple solution available, how can you say no?

You can visit the WP Retina 2x site here.

And download the plugin direct here.

WP Retina 2x Dashboard