WP Smush.it

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 23, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I was looking at my website on Alexa. One of the stats it had said that my site loaded slowly. Supposedly, 90% of other websites load faster than this site.

Smush! by Becka Spence

Although I dispute that, since it seems to load fast, I decided to take a look at it anyway. And I realized something that could be slowing things down are some of the images I’ve loaded into the posts. Most are larger than 100KB, which isn’t overly large, but once you start getting up to larger images then things will start to drag.

I wasn’t sure what to do about it until I read somewhere (wish I could remember where) about a plugin called WP Smush.it. What it will do is reduce the size of the images you upload without your losing any of its resolution. I can’t begin to tell you the technology, I’m afraid.

I loaded the plugin, then wasn’t sure what to do with it. In essence, I couldn’t figure out where the images were to do anything. Me being me, though, I searched and figured it out. The images are under Media to the left in your WordPress admin area, then Library. I hadn’t ever paid attention to this area before, so it’s pretty neat seeing all the pictures I’ve uploaded there.

Well, that’s not fully accurate. It will only show images you uploaded through the WP image area, which means it won’t show any images I uploaded through FTP (file transfer protocol for the uninitiated, which means stuff you upload to the internet via some kind of program). That’s too bad because every once in awhile I find that I have to upload an image that way because, strangely enough, WP gets mad sometimes if it thinks you’re uploading an image that’s too big; weasels! lol

Anyway, if you’re in the media library you’ll see images, and to the far right, once you’ve added the plugin, you’ll see where it’ll give you the option to “smush.it now”. I did that to some images and saw that each image was reduced a certain percentage. After doing it you get the option of doing a re-smush, but I haven’t tried that yet. I did go to check the post to see if it made the images look bad, but I didn’t notice any problems. Also, once you add it, any time you add an image it’ll automatically smush the image once you post your article, either live or for the future. That’s neat as well.

So this might be an option of something you can try if you notice, when checking your own post, that it’s loading kind of slow.

Tags: Blogging, images, media, Smush.it, wordpress plugins

23 Comments »

Ben Wan:

Hi Mitch,

In one of my tweets today was about smush.it plugin. Optimizing the size of the picture is part of website optimization, something I do. Smush.it does that automatically for you, that’s great, because the alternative is to use a photo editor like photoshop or paint.net to optimise those pictures.

Thumbs up to the writers of this plugin.

Ben Wan.

Mitch Reply:
December 23rd, 2010 at 10:33 AM

For sure, Ben. It’s obviously not perfect, but I think that might be more of an issue with WP than with them.

December 23rd, 2010 | 9:48 AM

Ileane:

Hey Mitch, I know just were I learned about this plugin (it was only last week) from Ana Hoffman at Traffic Generation Cafe. Well I went through the same steps you did after I installed it which I thought was pretty lame (why doesn’t the plugin do it across the board) that I needed to do each image one at a time. I was happy to see that there was some file size reduction, however apparently I need more than this plugin has to offer in terms of reducing my page load time, because it still loads very slowly!

I find it ironic that one of the things people advise is to get rid of so many plugins to reduce load time, yet I keep finding and installing plugins that make promises that don’t deliver. For example I tried WP Cache and then eventually WP
Super Cache but I wish had a plugin called – Reduce your page load speed right now! I just want to install it and keep going. (I can dream can’t I?)

So when you find a good plugin let me know so I can uninstall Smushit and the rest of them!

HA!

Mitch Reply:
December 23rd, 2010 at 10:35 AM

Ileane, I’m on the same quest. A blog I helped set up for a group I belong to loads really slow, and I can’t figure it out because there are no images on it, as it’s relatively new. I tried adding one of the cache plugins and it froze up; I had to figure a workaround just to get back into it.

I’ve been trying to figure out what the limit size is for WP to load images well, and so far I’m striking out. Otherwise, I could at least use Smush.it more often. Oh well…

December 23rd, 2010 | 9:54 AM

Patricia:

Hi Mitch

Well the geeks got SmushIt after me lol Can hardly believe it! I have had this plugin from the get-go on my site. It works fine for me but I probably don’t have a lot of the things on my blog that Ileane has.

Still smiling that I don’t have to go ask Ben about this as already on my site. Knew what you were talking about and you know me and all things techie

Patricia Perth Australia

Mitch Reply:
December 23rd, 2010 at 10:57 AM

And there you go, Pat; see, you’re not so far behind after all.

Patricia Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 10:08 AM

I was ahead with this one Mitch. Still smiling about it especially as Ben has to check the techie stuff for me usually!

Just as well I’m part of such an amazingly generous blogging community eh?!

Hope you have an enjoyable break Mitch. it’s so warm here and going to be hotter tomorrow (Christmas Day)!

Patricia Perth Australia

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 3:54 PM

Pat, it’s warm there, but here it’s around -4C; I hope you’re feeling pity for me. lol

December 23rd, 2010 | 10:36 AM

Alex@Jocuri:

Hey Mitch,
I can see you are really preoccupied by your loading speed. I would say not to worry, it loads pretty fast.
By the way did you check google webmaster tools where they show you the loading speed of your website? (you have to have your website verified in Google Webmaster)

Oh and if you have overly large images you can smush them online at http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ and then uploaded via wp (if the size reduction is enough to do this)

Ben Wan Reply:
December 23rd, 2010 at 11:27 PM

Alex,

Thanks for that, I didn’t know about ysmush.it. This is way easier than using those photo editors.

Ben Wan

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 12:52 AM

A;ex, every once in awhile I notice when I’ve loaded large images that a particular post seems to load slow. If I’ve got more than one and people come to the main page, it loads even slower. So, it’s just the next step into trying to be more courteous to visitors.

Thanks for that link; I’m definitely going to check it out.

December 23rd, 2010 | 7:08 PM

Carl:

Your blog is loading fairly fast Mitch, Yslow show grand D which is pretty fair. The things that can be done are applying gzip compression on css files, add eTags and expired headers. The only other option left is using CDN, but you don’t have many images, so this will be useless.

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 3:45 PM

Yeah Carl, I looked at that CDN thing and felt it wasn’t for me at this juncture. The load speed isn’t all that bad, but it’s nice to know about the plugin anyway I figure.

December 24th, 2010 | 2:36 AM

Carolee a.ka. Blogging Biz Mom:

Never heard of this plug-in.

Isn’t it amazing that we will probably never know it all…”a bloggers job is never done”….

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 3:50 PM

Carolee, it gives us a lot to write about so I’m not upset about it.

December 24th, 2010 | 9:36 AM

Allan Douglas:

I have not noticed your site loading slowly, but then my brain does not slice time into nanoseconds. Heck, at this point my brain barely recognizes time at all!

This is another great tip, Mitch! I’ve been “optimizing” photos for uplaod by hand — ok, ok, not by hand, I use software; JASC Photo Album to be precise — before I upload through WP. It’s kind of a pain since I often do not want to reduce the original photos in case I need to use them with a print publisher. The print guys want the highest resolution shots I can give them. And I don’t really want to have duplicates taking up space on my hard drive. Lots of housekeeping doing it this way.

I’m going to go grab this guy and pop him in there – this ought to save me gobs of prep time – THANKS!

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 3:53 PM

No problem, Allan; I hope it works well for you. I assume by print guys you’re talking about when you write a new book. I think we all need a link to your books as well.

December 24th, 2010 | 9:37 AM

Charles Gulotta:

I’ve also not sensed a long loading time. As Allan says, maybe they’re talking about fractions of seconds. However, I occasionally notice with my own blog that there’s sometimes a delay before the images appear. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does I notice — although if it did happen with someone else’s post, I doubt I’d even give it a thought.

Mitch Reply:
December 24th, 2010 at 3:56 PM

Maybe it’s a thing with perception, Charles. It might seem slow to me because I’m used to seeing some other sites load faster. One never knows, though.

December 24th, 2010 | 11:03 AM

Urban S:

Hi Mitch,

You dropped by my blog today and left a comment. Something tugged at me to visit. Wow, I love it when I slow down long enough to listen.

I just started using images a few months back that are usually huge and it was slowed down things a lot. This just might be what I was looking for. I will be looking it up when I leave.

Thanks,
Urban
Tucson SEO

Mitch Reply:
December 26th, 2010 at 1:29 PM

Always glad to help out where I can, Urban. And I’m glad you stopped by; I hope the plugin works well for you.

December 26th, 2010 | 4:01 AM

Rob:

Just to help round out the knowledge on Smush It here, Alex is correct that this is using the http://www.smushit.com/ API. It’s a pixel perfect compressor, which means it removes mainly metadata from the image with 0% decrease in image quality. It does not change the dimensions of the images – it reduces file size only. Of course cameras and most image editing software load up the metadata with garbage, so there’s it often a significant compression ratio.

Smush It was developed by Nicole Sullivan (http://www.stubbornella.org/) who handed over to Yahoo a couple years back.

Mitch Mitchell Reply:
March 12th, 2012 at 4:22 PM

Thanks for the extra info Rob. I didn’t know Yahoo owned the technology; that’s kind of interesting now isn’t it?

March 12th, 2012 | 2:40 PM

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I'm Just Sharing

Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Dec 23, 2010

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