Seems to work fine.

Hi @sirvo,

You can check your Media library to see how much you saved for each image.
This affects users and your server as well, each load of your site will take less data and if you multiply that by number of visitors you can get some nice numbers on reduced load of your server 🙂

Cheers,
Predrag

Hi @sirvo,

Question 1: Do I have to re-load my images into the various modules from my now-smushed media library before I derive the benefit of faster page loads for my site users?

Quick answer, no, there’s no need to re-load your images.
Long answer, so how smush works is that it sends your images to our servers where the optimization is done, once the image is optimized it’s sent back to your site and it replaces your existing images in library. That’s why there’s no need to add your images again.

Question 2: I am confused about how these 8 images are actually used by wordpress. When I go through the process of uploading an image into, lets say the ‘image module’, the dialog takes me to the media library but the only image file I can actually select is the one I originally loaded. Does WordPress automatically pick one of the smaller formats and deliver your smushed version of my image in that format to the image module? If not, how do I make use of these smushed formats?

WordPress itself defines three different thumbnail sizes, those are the image sizes that you can see when you go to add media to your content.
Now your theme and plugins can define additional ones that they use in their code.
So what happens when you upload an image is that WordPress takes that image and creates those defined thumbnails, they are not visible in your library but if you access your uploads folder you will see those thumbnails, there will be your original image, for example image.jpg and its thumbnails that will look like this: image-150×150.jpg, image-300×300.jpg and so on.

You should note that Free version of Smush only optimizes thumbnails and not the Full image itself, this is usually enough since the themes and plugins will use their defined thumbnails in the code instead of full image.
For example, if you create new post and select featured image for that post your theme will actually use thumbnail defined for that featured image instead of using your full image.

Hope this all makes sense 🙂

Cheers,
Predrag

Hi @sirvo,

Let me try explain myself a bit more and followup from this part:

WordPress itself defines three different thumbnail sizes, those are the image sizes that you can see when you go to add media to your content.
Now your theme and plugins can define additional ones that they use in their code.
So what happens when you upload an image is that WordPress takes that image and creates those defined thumbnails, they are not visible in your library but if you access your uploads folder you will see those thumbnails, there will be your original image, for example image.jpg and its thumbnails that will look like this: image-150×150.jpg, image-300×300.jpg and so on.

Let’s say that you upload new image for your logo that’s called logo.jpg, when you upload that image to your media library you will see it like that in there, but if you go to server you will see it actually has different copies of that image, logo-150×150.jpg, logo-300×300.jpg and so on.
There will probably be quite a few more, it depends on what thumbnail size your theme and plugins define.

Now in your theme there’s a function that calls your logo and it uses one of the thumbnails created, that’s defined in theme code.

So you will select logo.jpg but the theme code will actually choose thumbnail defined by theme, for example logo-300×300.jpg

Now, as mentioned before, free version of smush will optimize only thumbnails not the original image as well, so logo.jpg is not optimized while logo-300×300.jpg is.
In most cases themes have these thumbnails defined and there’s no need to actually optimize full size images.

There’s of course possibility that the theme uses full size image in some places and if you wish to optimize original images as well you can use Pro version of the plugin.

We do offer 14 day free trial that will unlock all Smush features if you want to give it a shot https://premium.wpmudev.org/

Cheers,
Predrag