WP Smush - The Most Popular Image Optimizer Plugin to Increase Your Web SEO (Review 2021)
Maintaining your website performance to always be in the best shape is very important. This includes optimizing images periodically. You need to know that the images on your website posts can significantly slow down your website. Therefore it is crucial to get your images optimized for your website.
Why optimize images?
Inserting images affects the readability of your posts. They enhance your site’s appearance, have a role to show off your products or work, and many more. However, the more images you have on your website, the heavier the browser’s work to load your pages. As the result, it slows down your websites whenever any visitors visit them.
The reason why images can slow down your websites is because of the large sizes of images. When you keep uploading big-sized images, all that data are compiled and takes up your website’s space. Consequently, your sites are slowing down.
The solution for this problem is image optimization. Plugins that perform image optimization make it possible for you to optimize your site for both performance and (image loading) speed, without requiring you to delete them from your website. This includes sizing images to the correct dimensions, compressing them, and serving them in WebP or other modern formats. This process makes your websites load faster for sure.
Read more: Tips & Trick – How to Compress Your Images Without Lossing Quality
In WordPress, there are quite a few plugins that can help you overcome this problem. Here we will review a plugin of WP Smush by WPMU DEV.
Getting Started
WP Smush is a plugin for WordPress to perform image optimization. With more than 1000k active installs, it is one of the most popular WordPress plugins in the official plugin repository. It is developed by WPMUDEV, which is a group renowned to has produced many useful WordPress plugins.
One of the best parts of WP Smush is that it’s very easy to use, even for beginners. Using this plugin, you can optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, compress, and improve your Google Page Speed.
You can use WP Smush for your WordPress site for free. But, if you want to get more optimizing features with no limitation, there is a premium version of WP Smush that you can opt for.
Watch the introduction video of WP Smush:
What Are the Features of WP Smush?
Lossless Compression
Strip unused data and compress images without degrading image quality.
This feature is the default setting that is offered in both free and premium versions. which is the default setting.
Lazy Load
Defer offscreen images by default.
It reduces the initial page loading time by preventing loading the images that are off the screen. In addition, you can save bandwidth for users who don’t fully scroll a page with images.
Bulk Smush
Optimize & compress up to 50 images with one click. In the premium version, you can do the bulk smush with an unlimited number of images.
Image Resizing
Set a max-width and height and large images will scale down as they are being compressed automatically.
Image CDN
Serve images directly from the WPMUDEV powerful CDNs. Your images will be served from a global network of fast servers. Powered by StackPath, the CDN has over 45 edge locations around the world
Incorrect Size Image Detection
Quickly locate images that are slowing down your site. Activate it and your images will be highlighted with smart tips for scaling your images.
Directory Smush
Optimize images even if they are not located in the media library.
Automated Optimization
Asynchronously auto-smush your attachments for super fast compression on upload.
No Monthly Limits
Optimize all of your images up to 5MB in size, free forever (no daily, monthly, or annual caps).
Integrations
WP Smush provides a few integrations with:
- Gutenberg Block Integration
View all the compression stats alongside image blocks in Gutenberg editor.
- WPBakery
If you use WPBakery to build pages, Smush can compress images uploaded to the page builder.
- Amazon S3
Optimize the images that you offload to cloud object storage like Amazon S3 or DigitalOcean Spaces using the WP Offload Media plugin.
- NextGen Gallery
Compress the images that you upload directly to the NextGen.
Multisite Compatible
Use the WP Smush plugin in all your WordPress websites with Multisite settings.
Process All Your Files
Smush can process PNG, JPEG, and GIF files for optimum results.
Super Servers
Smush images with no slowdown using WPMU DEV’s fast, reliable Smush API.
WebP Conversion
Upgrade and automatically serve images in Next-Gen WebP format. This feature is only available for the Pro version.
Auto-convert PNG to Lossy JPEG
To get a smaller size of images, you can convert your PNG format images to JPEG. It will result in small size JPEG with a high-quality image.
Why Should I Use WP Smush?
Optimizing your images without reducing quality
This plugin can optimize images, turn on lazy load, resize, and compress your image files. As the result, it improves the Google Page Speed of your websites.
You can reduce 5-6% in size most of the time. Even with that small difference, it resulted in visible improvements in GTmetrix scores.
The most important thing, the reduced images are still of high quality.
Compress any image in any directory
WP Smush lets you compress any type of image, such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and others. Moreover, if you want to compress images stored in different folders, WP Smush allows you to do it in any directory. You can optimize all the images on your site, including NextGEN images, images in Amazon S3 using WP Offload Media, and also images in every WordPress plugin or theme package.
Works automatically
Set up your WP Smush and it does all the work. WP Smush will automatically compress images on upload and resize your full-size images to a pre-set minimum and maximum.
In addition, it can strip unnecessary information off your images such as metadata and EXIF data (elements like camera settings, focal lengths, location, time and dates, etc).
Compatible with any themes, page builders, and media library plugins
No matter what theme or plugins you use on your WordPress media library, WP Smush can handle it.
WP Smush is compatible with many popular products on WordPress such as WP All Import, WP Offload Media, WP Media Folder, WP Retina 2x, NextGen Gallery, WPML, Envira Gallery, Avada Fusion Builder, Styles, and many more.
There is a free version
For you who want to optimize your images at no charge, you can use the free version of WP Smush. Even though it is free, it still includes pretty useful features, such as Unlimited Lossless Compression, 50 images Bulk Smush, Lazy Load, Incorrect Size Image Detection, Resize Image, Multisite setting, and etc.
Where Can I Get WP Smush?
Free version
Get the free version of WP Smush by installing the plugin from your WordPress dashboard. Here are the steps:
- In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins > Add New.
- Search for ‘wp smush’.
- Choose the Smush by WPMU DEV.
- Click on the Install Now button,
- Activate the Smush plugin.
Pro version
If you are interested in WP Smush Pro, WPMU Dev gives a 7-day free trial. So you can try to decide if it is right for you or not.
Here are the steps to get the free trial:
- Click on the ‘Try Smush Pro Free’ button on the settings page
- On Smush’s pricing page on WPMU, you can choose the monthly or yearly plans. Click the Start 7 Days Free Trial.
- Set up your account by providing your email, name, and password.
- Provide the payment details to activate the trial.
- Then connect WPMU DEV with your site. Enter the URL of your site and continue.
- Enter the username and password of your WordPress site, so that WPMU DEV can access your site.
- Click ‘Activate Smush Pro Now’.
You can cancel the free trial anytime.
How Is WP Smush Pricing?
WP Smush divides its plans based on the number of sites and monthly/yearly payments.
Monthly
There are 3 options according to the number of sites: 1 site, 20 sites, and unlimited sites.
The cheapest is the 1 site plan with a Personal and Smush Pro. Both plans include all the pro features, but the Personal plan also includes 24/7 LiveChat Support, Performance & Uptime Pack, Security & Backups Pack, SEO & Marketing Pack, and Automated Safe Updates.
You can get the Personal plan for $19.0/ month and Smush Pro for $6.0/ month.
Yearly
The yearly plan only differs in the prices.
The 1 site Personal plan costs $190/ year. Meanwhile, the 1 site Smush Pro costs $60/ year.
See all the WP Smush premium plans here.
How to Use WP Smush?
Pros
- Very easy to use.
- Clean & user-friendly interface.
- An unlimited number of image optimizations for free.
- Feature-rich pro version.
Cons
- No control on how much to reduce images.
- Limitations in the free version: only 50 images bulk smush, max 1 MB file size.
- The Pro version is expensive compared to other plugins.
- Intrusive advertisement.
What Are the Alternatives to WP Smush?
There are other WordPress image optimizer plugins that can be alternatives to WP Smush:
Read also: Top 10 Best Image Compression Tools to Boost Your Website SEO Ranking
Conclusion
WP Smush is a WordPress plugin that allows you to optimize images without losing quality. It is a great tool to speed up your website loading time and upgrade your SEO. On top of that, it has a clean interface that makes it easy for you to set up things.
If you currently do not use any image optimizer plugins, then you should give the free WP Smush a try. It allows losslessly compressing unlimited images, bulk smush, and resize images. If you have websites with busy traffic then you should just go with the yearly plan of the Pro version.
References
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