One of the responsibilities WP Engine has as a premium managed WordPress hosting provider is to ensure our customers are running the highest quality plugins possible on their WordPress installs. This means that we keep an eye out for plugins that can slow a WordPress site down, or even plugins that unintentionally create security vulnerabilities. When we see plugins like this, we add them to a disallowed list, and recommend alternatives.
Of course, the disallowed list is something we always hope a plugin can make its way off of someday so that it can be used in our ecosystem again. When the questionable code gets re-written, we’re very willing to re-test the plugin and then re-allow it if it passes muster.
Today, we’re happy to announce that WP Engine is removing WP Smush.it from our disallowed plugins list. WPMU Dev has taken over development of the plugin and there have been a number of fixes since we placed it on our disallowed list.
Smush.it is a tool from Yahoo that losslessly compresses images to reduce their size while ensuring that they retain their visual quality. This decreases the amount of bandwidth a site uses when serving up pages. In some cases, it decreases the amount of bandwidth considerably.
History
Previously, we disallowed WP Smush.it due to a number of behaviors that were expensive and unneccsary from a computational resources perspective. It also had a bad habit of bringing servers down when it couldn’t connect with its API.
For those of you keeping track at home, here are the details why we disallowed the plugin:
- It would get caught in an endless loop when the Smush.it API would go down. Basically, it would keep rechecking for the API endpoint over and over until it would cripple the server. When plugins bring entire servers down, that’s never a good thing.
- The plugin was also attempting to to re-Smush already compressed images, which was unnecessary from a computational resources perspective.
- It would send images that exceeded the Smush limit of 1 MB up to Yahoo.
- Additionally at the time, we were performing weekly “smushes” (lossless compression: stripping out metadata, etc.) on images for customers on the server. We no longer do this, but that service made Smush.it redundant, which was additional justification to place Smush.it on the disallowed list.
Changes to Smush.it
Now that WPMUDEV has taken over development, we’ve seen a lot of great fixes coming down from their team, and received several customer requests to re-evaluate the plugin’s place on our disallowed plugins list.
Upon review, it’s clear that the WPMUDEV team has built-in more intelligent API handling & timeouts. It handles the lossless compression in a far more ecological manner, and we’re pleased to re-allow our customers to install and use the plugin.
Smush.it is no longer attempting to re-Smush already compressed images and it won’t send files that exceed the Smush limit up to Yahoo. Also, if the plugin detects a timeout, it won’t attempt to Smush images again for 6 hours, meaning the server’s performance is unaffected by API timeouts.
Here’s the Smush.it changelog: http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/changelog/
Very good news. It’s good to know you sometimes reconsider adding plugins that were disallowed before. Time to install it again :).
This IS good news – I recently discovered Smush.it and installed it on my site, and within the month moved to WP Engine only to discover Smush.it was on the “disallowed” list.
It’s going back on my site! 🙂
Thanks! Great news!
The best part about this plugin is “bulk smush.it”
you can use it to compress already uploaded images…
I thought WPEngine did some kind of image optimizing? One thing I noticed is I would grab images off my blog and run them through smush it and there was still optimization available.
Does this mean WP Smushit is superior to whatever WPEngine does in the backend?
This is great news! Even with the spotty code Smush.it still worked the best for compressing images. Can’t believe that I missed it for a month, but still.
Hey Austin!
Thanks for sharing this. Honestly, didn’t noticed this and thought it was still on your no-no list! Appreciate for sharing.
~Reginald
Smush.it plugin crashed our website on wpengine in November 2013. Luckily WPengine backup system is superb.
Just wow ! Installing it again.
That is awesome news. Are there any restrictions with TinyPNG API plugins? Just wondering since I can get even better file sizes on PNGs using that method.
Hey Frank, you should be just fine using those plugins on our platform!
-Austin
I seriously dislike WPMU DEV’s hard-sell of their memberships, and have had bad experiences with their plugins in the past. I frankly don’t trust them to continue to provide this as a free plugin to the WP community.
Since EWWW Image Optimizer isn’t allowed, what other image compression plugin options are on your approved list?
I use this plugin no error but sometime it clear my genuine files . why this happen
WP Smush is a wonderful plugin .
It helps in creating fast loading websites as reduces the size remarkably.
Thank you so much for sharing valuable article about WP Smush.it. This is good news for every blogger and I hope everyone get benefit on it. WP Smush it very image compression plugin is very useful tool for WordPress blog.
Great News it is I have one website on namecheap which earlier i wanted to host on wp engine but due to not working wp smush i chose namecheap. Now thinking of moving it on wp engine. Thumbs Up WP Engine.
Nice article. I would like to add some value to this post. Recently I came across a very nice WP plugin. The new
bloggers flood their blog with all the high-resolution images to make it nice and attractive. But for the matter
of fact, that reduces the speed of the website and it takes a lot of time to load which hampers the user experience.
Use ‘wp smush’ to reduce the size of images and keep the quality good. The free version will allow 50 images to
smush at a time, then you need to start the process again for next 50 images. Premium version will take this
restriction off.
Hope this one of the nice ways to optimize an image.
This Is Very Good News………