Boost Web Performance: Compress Images with Tencent’s Zhitu Gulp Plugin

Zhitu is a platform developed by Tencent’s front‑end team for image compression and format conversion, supporting PNG, JPEG, GIF and automatically generating WebP versions.

Compressed images retain high visual quality while significantly reducing file size (e.g., a 156 KB image becomes 55 KB).

Zhitu can be used via manual upload at zhitu.isux.us or integrated into a build workflow with the gulp-imageisux plugin.

Using the Gulp Plugin

Install Gulp globally: npm install --global gulp Install the plugin globally: npm install --global gulp-imageisux Create a project structure, e.g.:

test/
│-- img/
│   └── test.jpg
└── gulpfile.js

Write gulpfile.js:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var imageisux = require('gulp-imageisux');

gulp.task('default', function () {
  return gulp.src(['img/*'])
    .pipe(imageisux('', true));
});

The imageisux function takes two arguments: the destination path for compressed images (empty string creates dest and webp folders) and a boolean indicating whether to generate WebP files.

Run the task in the project directory: gulp After execution, the img directory will contain two new folders, dest (compressed JPEG/PNG) and webp (converted WebP images).