Slow bulk optimisation, many errors, minimal speed improvement

  • askhematologist

    (@askhematologist)


    2 months, 4 weeks ago

    I used ShortPixel’s one-time paid plan to optimise the images on my medical website, but the overall experience was disappointing. The bulk optimisation process was extremely slow — it ran for more than 36 hours — and still finished with 197 errors that required separate re-optimisation. Unfortunately, the improvement in my PageSpeed scores was trivial (if any). I understand that website speed is influenced by other factors such as server response time and JavaScript issues, but I expected to see at least some noticeable gains after image optimisation.

    One important note: ShortPixel consumes a surprisingly high number of credits, sometimes close to 100 credits for a single image when thumbnails and alternative formats are included. Also, to avoid repeated timeouts, you must whitelist their API both on your hosting server and in Cloudflare, or the optimisation may run even slower.

    The main positive point is the support team — they respond quickly, explain issues clearly, and even used temporary website credentials to help correct their CDN-related image URL issues that had adversley affected my SEO-driven traffic. Their professionalism and willingness to help raised my rating from two to three stars.

    In summary, excellent support but the technical performance and overall optimisation results did not fully meet my expectations.

    • This topic was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by askhematologist. Reason: Helpful Support Team
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  • Plugin Support Adrian

    (@adrianrus)

    2 months, 4 weeks ago

    Hi @askhematologist ,

    Thank you for your message! I’m sorry to hear about this issue 🙁

    I’ve checked your support ticket, and from what I can see, you confirmed that the issue wasn’t related to us but to your hosting provider’s CloudLinux memory limits.

    ”I’ve checked this with my hosting provider, and they confirmed the errors were caused by CloudLinux memory limits (PMEM) killing the PHP worker during processing. They have since increased the limit, and optimisation completed normally.”

    The firewall issue was also related to your hosting provider, and this can happen with any image optimization plugin that uses servers. Because you have many images with multiple thumbnails, numerous requests are needed to optimize everything. Some firewalls are more sensitive and may temporarily block some or all of our IPs. This can be easily fixed by whitelisting our IPs, as my colleague mentioned.

    Credit consumption per image depends on the number of thumbnails generated by your theme and WordPress itself, so usage varies based on your thumbnail count. We have a thumbnail exclusion system that can help you save credits by skipping unnecessary sizes. More information here.

    As for PageSpeed scores, they generally improve when you generate and deliver WebP/AVIF images, as shown in this article. However, depending on your theme and hosting provider, additional optimizations may be needed to improve scores further and those factors are outside our control as we already mentioned within the support ticket. My colleague offered to log in and help configure the settings and check this for you but you haven’t provided access.

    I find this review a bit unfair since the problems weren’t related to our plugin, and we still did our best to help.

    We’re still happy to work with you and get everything related to WebP/AVIF configured perfectly so you can have a great optimization experience. Just reach out whenever you’re ready, we’re here for you! 🙂

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