Recently I got a comment on one of my articles making me aware of a new plugin, Way2enjoy Image Optimizer and Resize Image – WordPress Image Compression. I’m always looking for ways to speed up my clients’ sites, so I thought I would give this plugin a test drive.
I saw it got good reviews, so I backed up my client’s site, which was very image heavy, and I checked it on both Page Speed Insights and Pingdom’s Speed Test to get a base reading.
Before
It was doing very poorly with a Desktop rating of just 48 and a mobile rating of only 55 on Page Speed. It’s Pingdom rating wasn’t much better at just 76 with a load time of a whopping 24.04s. That’s not great for SEO or users.
During
I installed the plugin and it started compressing images right away.
There are a lot of images on this site and I was worried about hitting my quota from the plugin too quickly. Note that there is a monthly limit to the plugin. You can always increase that limit by paying for the upgrade. I was on a budget so I stopped the automatic optimization and looked through the settings to see that it allowed me to optimize specific images from my media library, or even images from a specific folder. When I looked at my results on Page Speed, I saw that some of the images weren’t being pulled from the media library, but from a caching plugin folder, so I was able to find that folder and compress those images.
I actually wasn’t crazy about the immediate start of the optimization because there are a lot of nice settings that I didn’t have the chance to adjust before the optimization started, although I can see some people just want to install the plugin and let it do it’s thing. For me, this was a downside.
On a good note, I had previously been regenerating thumbnails on this site and had the server timeout because of the large load. There was no such problem with this plugin.
One odd thing was that the file size that the plugin reported was different from the file size that Page Speed reported. You can see that a little bit here:
Optimization recommendations by Google’s Page Speed Insights
Files after they had been compressed by Way2enjoy
Another thing to note is that it optimizes all the image sizes of any image in the media libary, so not just your full size image, but also your thumbnails, medium, and large images as well. So, you have a quota of 1000 images allowed per month with the free version, but make sure to uncheck the option to optimize sizes you don’t use so save your quota. This can be found by going to Media > Way2enjoy Image, and then scrolling to the bottom.
Be sure to uncheck images sizes that you are not using to save your quota!
After: The Results
I checked the results again right away and noticed no change. Of course, the site was being cached, so I had to clear the cache. Then, almost right away I got this results on Pingdom:
Pingdom load time before: 24.04s with a page size of 4.2 MB.
After: load time went to just 3.67s and page size is now just 1.5 MB.
Before
After
Click on the images to see larger.
Note, the performance grade went down just a little, but I suspect that is because I had to clear the cache to get these results immediately. I expect that score to go back up when the cache rebuilds in a couple days.
Update: the next day (not even a full 24 hours later) the load time dropped to only 2.95s and it was faster than 53% of tested sites, however performance grade was still just 74. What the heck?? Google Page Speed desktop had gone up from 48 to 56, which is a huge improvement for one plugin, but it was still showing that those images needed to be optimized at the same amount as the Before rate, so something was clearly wrong there.
One really important thing about this plugin is that the plugin author is answering all support questions. To me, that’s super important to know that there is a place to go in case there are any problems. However, the full documentation for this plugin is not yet available, although the plugin author says it is in the works.
Check out their video to learn more:
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