How To Compress Your Images and Boost Even Further Your Website's Performance


First of all let's have a quick look at the problem in hand: Most of the images that we use in our Wordpress sites contain bytes which are unnecessary. Therefore it would be nice, if we had a clever and easy to implement solution to take these bytes out of the way (obviously without touching the picture quality AT ALL!).

This would mean smaller images and faster sites. And this applies to all of us whether we use only a few smaller images for our articles and pages, or whether we keep an image-heavy site.

WP Smush.It Plugin


WP Smush.It Plugin is basically an image optimization project run by Yahoo in the context of their YSlow methodology of analyzing website's performance.

Smush.It is utilizing specific optimization techniques for each individual file format in order to remove, as mentioned above, the unnecessary bytes from the image files that we use. The techniques it uses are "lossless", which means that the optimization is achieved without changing the quality of the image.

This brilliant functionality is offered to us with the ease of use of a Wordpress plugin.




All you have to do is install and activate it. After you're done, visit your Wordpress media library and click the "Smush.it now!" link on each individual image you want to compress. Of course you can also select to do a batch edit of all your uploaded images, so that you can optimize all your media with one click.



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Pobman Premium
I would not suggest most people run with W3 Total Cache, unless your server is setup right you will not see all the improvements from this plugin and you can actually make things worse. If you install it and you only have options for Disk caching, i.e. no APC etc. then I would just jump ship to Super Cache which pretty much works out of the box.

Running with the CDN though is a massive improvement for most people, I now run most sites with static content on cloudfront and the difference is out of this world.

FYI Cloudfront have added Sydney Australia to their CDN... makes them a winner in my book!

Nice guide though.
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Viterbi Premium
I agree: W3 Total Cache, works even better with APC. For those who don't know, APC stands for Alternative PHP Caching and it's an opcode running on the server side which offers a more efficient caching model. In other words, in some hosts you cannot enable it and you have to use the Disk Caching option in W3 Total Cache. For those cases, I fully agree, it's better to use WP Super Cache as your caching solution.

As far as the CDN and CloudFront is concerned, I also think it's one of the best CDN providers around.

Thanks for the comment Pobman!
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Denisara Premium
smush it doesnt appear to work. it does nothing if I 'mass smush' and if I do them one at a time (and I have 364 pics) it times out. any suggestions? here is the error message I am getting: Automatic smushing has been disabled temporarily due to an error. Operation timed out after 20071 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

i tried a few more pics to "smush" and now they show up "BLANK" how do i get them back? this does NOT work
case in point:
http://bonestrivia.com/bones-season-eight-begins/bones-season-eight

this is one pic "smushed" out of about 12 that i tried this on. how do you reverse this ??????

i guess i have to redo that work completely if I want pictures to show UP
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Pobman Premium
smush does work... some of the time.. the problem is the service is totally overloaded and Yahoo clearly dont care to improve things... it works like 1:10 times it would seem... a shame.

However other than getting the error I have never actually had an issue with it damaging a site.
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Viterbi Premium
Sometime Yahoo's server gets overloaded from users doing the same thing as you do. The reason is that Smush.it sends a COPY of your image to Yahoo's server -> It optimizes this copy -> And then downloads it to your website. Next time you try it, it should be fine.

Regarding the problem with the blank picture, I also never had any issues and I also cannot find any similar incidents online. It's very safe, especially because of the way it's working (described above: copy is sent to server, optimized and then downloaded). Even if the process get's stack in the way, your original will stay intact.
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Pobman Premium
There are other plugins which do similar things, though they all seem to require certain resources to be installed on your server which makes them unlikely to work for those on shared hosting.

If you need to 'fix' a whole site and the bulk change tool is not working then using the multiple upload tool at smush.it is almost as easy. Just FTP all your images down, smush and upload. The advantage here is you do get to check each image first. Thinking back to the problem of SmushIt breaking images I have now and then had issues with PNG and transparency...

A lot of people will just rely on the CDN though, because at the speed the CDN works at even large images come down lightning fast. This of course is not solving the problem, just going around it.
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Denisara Premium
funny, I was told that W3 Total Cache is a mistake to use unless you get like over 10k visitors per month by either Jay, Kyle or Carson...among others. The rest of what you say to do does not make sense to a newb such as myself but thanks for the article...maybe it will help someone else
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Viterbi Premium
W3 Total Cache is a really complicated plugin and you have to do your homework if you want to start playing with the advanced options it provides.

I also agree with the opinion that W3 Total Cache might perform even better in more popular sites (sites receiving more visitors). For less popular sites, WP Super Cache could be more efficient and easy to use.

Bottom line: Each site is different and you can test both options (or even other ones as well) to see what works best for you. The point here is that your website would be far more efficient and optimized if you integrated a caching solution to it (whatever that is).

P.S. I tried to make this training as "newb-friendly" as possible :-)
So please let me know where you need support and I'll do my best to help!
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Viterbi Premium
Thank you Roger!
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morlandroger Premium
WOW this is very comprehensive! Will come back to it and look at some of my sites again with a view to speeding up load times. Thanks for this
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