Wp Smush Pro WordPress Plugin – Optimizing images on your WordPress site is one of the important tasks to improve page loading speed and improve the results of tools like Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom. Since each individual image on the page sends a separate HTTP request to the header, optimized images will have the following additional benefits.
- Increase page loading speed, thereby improving user experience.
- Reduce server load with reduced image sizes.
- Save storage space on the server, thereby helping you save on storage.
- Reduce network bandwidth, thereby reducing the cost of hosting.
Thus, image optimization is necessary not only for users and search engines. One of the main goals of image optimization is to save on server costs, especially if you have a very large site. We’ve been using the WP Smush plugin on several sites for years and here’s a real review if you’re looking for image optimization on your WordPress site.
WordPress Image Optimization
Since image optimization is the most important thing for website owners, there are many free and add-on plugins that can help you with this task without using Photoshop or any other online tools. These plugins remove unnecessary data from images and optimize them automatically on upload. We tested most of the plugins and found that WP Smush works best with the Google PageSpee Insights tool.
Image optimization with WP Smush
After installing and activating the plugin, you have two options for deleting images – individual image optimization and bulk image optimization.
Splitting individual images
Go to Media > Library and click the Nudge Now button next to an individual image. You will see optimization statistics as shown below:
Breakdown of mass images
To optimize bulk images, go to Media > WP Smush and click the Bulk Smush Now button. This free plugin allows you to shift 50 images with one click and you can continue smoothing all images.
You can also delete all images in a catalog by going to the Delete Catalog section and selecting the image catalog on your server.
Other settings and options
The following options are available with the WP Smush plugin:
- Automatically compress all new downloads.
- Set a maximum image size so that large images are automatically resized before uploading to your server.
- Choose to keep or delete EXIF data such as camera settings, focal length, date, time, and location information. For bloggers, this option can be turned off to reduce the size of images.
- Enable offset when uploading new images. This will automatically optimize all newly uploaded images.
- You can view statistics on the number of optimized images, size reduction and savings.
- Detection of incorrect images that do not fit in the viewport. You can view incorrect images on the site by logging in as an administrator.
- Enable lazy loading to hide images outside of the viewport and load them when the user scrolls to the position of the image. However, this doesn’t work on our site and we use WP Rocket ‘s lazy loading feature .
- Integrate with Gutenberg, Visual Composer , Amazon S3 and NextGen Gallery.
In addition, the pro version will have features for optimizing original images, zooming in by 2x, and keeping the original copy of images.
Smush Pro
If you’re looking for more image optimization options, check out the premium version. It will cost you $70 per year as part of a WPMU DEV subscription.
- Automatically convert PNG to JPEG to reduce the size where possible.
- Make a backup copy of all original images.
- Remove the image size limit from 5MB in the free plugin to 32MB in the Pro version.
- Integrated CDN with WebP support.
- 2x compression with no visible quality loss.
Summary
WP Smush is one of the best image optimization plugins to improve the page speed of your WordPress site. Although the free plugin has limitations, it is a more suitable solution for the site owner.
pros
- It works well with the Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
- Optimization happens with server resources from the plugin developer (WPMU DEV), thus not taking more resources from your server. This is especially good for sites hosted in a shared hosting environment.
- You can rewind an unlimited number of images.
- The plugin will automatically optimize and reduce the size of all new images uploaded to posts.