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SVGO Use

Updated on
Last site update: 10 Jun 2026

SVGO is a CLI tool to compress SVG’s. If you’ve just created an SVG from an app like Illustrator for example, using SVGO will reduce the file size by getting rid of extraneous code.

It’s a mature tool that’s regularly updated and can be installed with npm: npm -i svgo.

For simple use just use svgo path/to/my.svg. This will compress that file.

If you want to be able to read and presumably edit your svg in a code editor afterwards then add the --pretty option.

1svgo my.svg --pretty

And if you want to output the file to a different folder use the output -o flag and the path to the folder:

1svgo my.svg -o path/to/folder --pretty

This creates a new version of the file in that folder in a human readable format.

Official Help

This is from the help file (svgo --help)

Usage: svgo [options] [INPUT…]

Nodejs-based tool for optimizing SVG vector graphics files

Arguments: INPUT Alias to –input

Options:

flag added to svgofunction
-v, –versionoutput the version number
-i, –input <INPUT…>Input files, “-” for STDIN
-s, –string Input SVG data string
-f, –folder Input folder, optimize and rewrite all *.svg files
-o, –output <OUTPUT…>Output file or folder (by default the same as the input), “-” for STDOUT
-p, –precision Set number of digits in the fractional part, overrides plugins params
–config Custom config file, only .js is supported
–datauri Output as Data URI string (base64), URI encoded (enc) or unencoded (unenc)
–multipassPass over SVGs multiple times to ensure all optimizations are applied
–prettyMake SVG pretty printed
–indent Indent number when pretty printing SVGs
-r, –recursiveUse with ‘–folder’. Optimizes *.svg files in folders recursively.
–exclude <PATTERN…>Use with ‘–folder’. Exclude files matching regular expression pattern.
-q, –quietOnly output error messages, not regular status messages
–show-pluginsShow available plugins and exit
-h, –helpdisplay help for command