4 Stars

Cons: Do not set up to “double” the compression in Pro. Unless you have already set up your theme’s image directory to ignore. Instead, upload those image files in the media library and compress manually one by one. Then download or move them from the uploads directory and place (over write) the image files in your theme’s image directory. Why do this?

If you set up Smush to compress and remove the original file, you will need to upload a new image from backup. The compression is too high for some graphics. There are issues with png files.

Don’t use the “lossy” jpg conversion of png files. This again, will leave you very disappointed. And you will need to restore those files processed.

Expect double the time to confirm image uploads to your WP website. To optimize an image is to re-code in binary form. This takes time and is not the same as “crunching” an image. Which distorts images, and crops them. It does not optimize the image. Crunching is the same as reducing quality percentage. Again, this is not optimizing an image.

To optimize an image is to render an image. And to do so, takes twice the time on each image upload to process. There is latency in the web, and therefore, depending on peak use of this service and volume of customers on your website uploading images, there can be a significant delay in processing dozens of images at once.

If you have a website where customers are uploading images, you need to explain this to them in your content. Or you could allow uploads as usual, and then manually “Smush” the images altogether each night yourself, before publishing the content. Or scheduling it for publishing.

This way, your customers won’t be delayed and during peak times. This is what I have set up. In other words, let your customers get their images uploaded asap. Then do your optimizing in off hours, when you are not doing backups and people are not visiting your site (lowest visit rate period). You can “Smush” all the images at once each night if you like, via the Media Library.

If you are allowing image uploads by customers, please set to keep the original image. You can always download or keep on another cloud hosting account, in the event the Smush plugin ruins the image quality in a double Smush.

In most cases, image quality is retained in double Smush. However, it appears to have issue with Adobe type graphics and not actual photo images. For photo images, the double smush is noticeable, but only because you are looking for deterioration, and not because a visitor would notice the difference.
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Pro: After you have compressed your theme’s image files and placed them back in your theme’s image directory, you are ready to set up Smush Pro’s “Double Compression.” Why do this? If you are using any design audit tools, you will find the default compression is too low. And you will get warnings about the image not being “optimized” in the browser developer tools.

Setting up double compression will achieve a almost same compression ratio as used by Google. It is at 92-95% of Google’s machine compression tool.

There is no need to keep the original files uploaded now. Having Smush set up to automatically double compress any new images will be fine. However, if you experience the compression to be too distorted on some images, you will need to remove this setting for automated double compression. And manually compression your uploaded images one at a time in the Media Library.

You can also compress each image upon uploading in the Media Library pop up window.

Finally, Smush is a very needed plugin. It uses off server resources via API. This is great for your website. The price is worthy on its own for commercial websites with daily uploads of images in the hundreds. For SEO work, it will save you having to retrieve optimized images from Google and uploading them to your website. This saves time and again is worthy of the price.

• This topic was modified 9 years ago by Robert Lang.