WP Smush.it (link to plugin developer) is a good plugin used to compress WordPress images (known as ‘image optimization’) that helps your website pages to load faster.
Unfortunately, when left activated WP Smush.it slows down your site…so it has the opposite effect it is meant to achieve!
And WP-Smush.it, a Yahoo service behind the scenes that does the image processing, seems to go in and out of ‘working’ properly quite a bit over time.
What We Recommend
So we recommend you only activate this plugin as needed (when adding images) to get the benefit of image compression for new images that are uploaded, then deactivate it immediately when done uploading images since it will slow down your site.
Use Only As Needed
Since activating and deactivating the WP Smush.it plugin every time you want to add a post or page is a hassle, you can leave it deactivated most of the time, then run a ‘bulk Smush.it’ once in a while to compress any images that you may have missed.
Bulk Smush.it will run through all of your images at one time and compress (or even re-compress) any images it can. Bulk smushing can take a few minutes to process.
Warning: I’ve found that Bulk Smush.it often doesn’t work either (it usually times out), so proceed with caution, then ‘disable’ when not in use.
I agree.
After installing I ran a speedtest and about 3 seconds were added to every page.
So yes, it’s bulk smushing is a great feature.
But leave it deactivated.
THANK YOU! We use W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare CDN and Smush on the Avada Theme, we had random images not loading (rather, loading as blank placeholders) for some reason and being replaced with a gif that was “1×1” but the right image size with urls like:
data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==
Disabling lazy load feature on Smush did not help. Other solutions regarding disable our W3 Total Cache minify for css or other clashing plugins did not help. Clearing our caches also did not help. We were at a real loss as what to try beyond throwing out the CDN or the smushed images…but our godaddy site now loads in a fraction of a second vs 6+ seconds.
However your suggestion to disable Smush when not in use DID fix things and kept the performance upgrades. THANK YOU FOR SHARING!
You’re welcome, thanks for the feedback. I would suggest you also use another WordPress specific hosting service like WP Engine which is strongly recommended for site speed, security, auto-backups and more.