Smush Pro Review Details
Images are one of the most common components that slow down a website, at the same time we can’t do without the images. So, you need to make sure that the images are properly sized and optimized to the best of their potential so that it doesn’t affect the loading speed.
The loading speed has been one of the important parameters that determine the overall quality of a site and a very important part of the search engine ranking algorithm. And with the Core vitals becoming a part of the Google search algorithm, it is even more important now.
Smush Pro is a very handy plugin that can help you to improve the overall loading speed and code vital score for your site to a large extent by optimizing all the images on your site.
Before we move ahead with the details of the plugin and how it can help your website. Let’s have a look at some of the community reviews to understand the sentiments around the platform.
WPMU DEV has 4.9 TrustScore on the Trustpilot platform after over 1800 reviews which is remarkable. And similar sentiments on other review platforms as well.
Getting Started With Smush Pro
You can get started with the Smush plugin like any other WordPress plugin, it is simple and easy. Before we check the Smush Pro plugin, let’s have a look at the free plugin.
Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images
If you don’t have the budget to go for the premium version of the plugin, you can start using the free option.
The Smush plugin has more than 1 million active installations and a five-star rating.
You can install the Smush plugin right from your WordPress dashboard. Go to WordPress admin, Plugins >> Add New and find Smush.
Once the plugin is activated, you will have the settings in the WordPress dashboard. You get options like bulk image optimization so that all your previously uploaded images are optimized. You get the option of Lazy Loading images, the option to convert images to the WebP so that the overall performance of your site improves.
Installing Smush Pro
WPMU DEV offers several top-quality products for the WordPress platform, that includes plugins, hosting, and WordPress management. It comes in a membership model and gives you access to the products it offers. We will see the pricing in detail below in the article.
For now, let’s move ahead with the Smush Pro details.
You can access all the products from the WPMU DEV Hub. Once you take membership, you will get access to the Hub.
You can add your project to the Hub & start using the products. I have added one WordPress site to test it.
When you click on the plugins at the top menu, you will see all the plugins that are available for installation. You can select Smush Pro and click on “Add to Your Site“.
If you have multiple WordPress projects listed on the WPMU DEV Hub, you can select the one where you wish to install the plugin and proceed. You can Install and Activate the plugin right from the Hub.
Once the Pro plugin is installed and activated, you will see the plugin options in the dashboard. As you can see in the image below, on our test site, there are more than 900 images that can be bulk optimized, other than that, you will see the options like activating CDN, Lazy Load, etc.
Optimizing Images With Smush Pro
The Smush Pro plugin is simple and easy to use, there are no complicated settings that you have to deal with. As of now, we have activated the plugin and seen the dashboard. Now, to optimize the images on your site, you can go to the Bulk Smush settings, here you will see all the options to optimize images.
If you have started using the plugin on an old site with hundreds of images, you can use the Bulk Smush Now option to optimize the old images. You just have to click on it and wait for the system to complete the optimization process, nothing much to do.
While you go for the bulk smush, you have the option to exclude certain image sizes if you want to for any reason.
Optimize Your Images on Upload
Smush gives you the option to optimize the images automatically when you upload them. You have the option to exclude image dimensions for the optimization process as we mentioned above.
There is also an option to Super Smush Images for further optimization if the loading speed is very important for you. This setting will maximize the optimization process.
There is an option to compress images when you upload them as the default WordPress doesn’t compress the images to reduce overall file size.
Convert Your PNGs to JPEGs
The JPEGs images are smaller in size as compared to PNGs. The Smush Pro plugin gives you the option to convert the PNGs to JPEGs. the system will check the files and see if there is any possibility to reduce the size by converting them.
Lazy Loading Images
Lazy loading has been one of the most widely used and popular techniques to speed up the loading of a page. If your page has a lot of images, loading all the images at once will slow down the page, so why not defer the images that are not visible yet?
Deferring your off-screen images makes it easier for the server to load the page quickly with the visible images only.
Smush Pro plugin comes with the lazy loading option that you can enable for your site.
When you click on the option to activate Lazy Loading, you will get the option to exclude certain image types and output locations if needed.
Smush Pro CDN
If a user is accessing your site from the nearest location from the server, the site will load a lot quicker than a user from far. Smush Pro comes with a 45-point CDN to boost the loading speed of your site by serving your site from the nearest server.
In the next step, you will also get the option to convert all the images to Google’s preferred next-gen format, WebP. You can choose to convert all the images automatically or you can go for the manual option.
Detect Incorrect Image Sizes and Fix It
Correct image size is important so that they are served perfectly at the front-end. The plugin gives you an option to highlight the images that are either too large or too small than what they should be.
Go to the Tools section on the Smush Pro settings and enable the option.
Reset to Original Settings
In case you wish to go back to your original settings, the Smush Pro plugin comes with the reset option so that you can get back the original images and settings.
Go to the Smush Pro tab on WordPress admin, click on settings, here you will see the options to reset to original under the Data & Settings tab.
