How it works

WordPress stores images in two parts:

• The image files are stored on the server, typically in the ‘wp-content/uploads’ directory of the site.
• A record of the image is then stored in the database, in the Media Library. This record also includes other data related to the image, such as the image tile, description or alt-text.

When removing an image, both the image files and Media Library record will be deleted.

Removing Unused Images

Open the ‘Images’ tab in the WP-Optimize Premium admin page and press the “Unused images and sizes” tab.

To scan your website for unused images, press the “Scan website for unused images” button. WP-Optimize will now scan for unused image files, found both in the Media Library and the ‘wp-content/uploads’ directory, that are not attached or embedded in any posts or pages.

You will now be presented with all the unused images that are on your site. To delete these images, either individually select the images by clicking on the images to highlight them, or press the “Select all” button to delete all unused images.

Once you have selected all the unused images you want to delete from your site, scroll down and either choose “Move selected images to trash” or “Delete the selection permanently”. WP-Optimise will then delete all copies of the selected image file plus any record in the Media Library.

You will receive a notification that your images have now been deleted.

Removing Images by size

You can also choose to remove unused images by size, but please note that removing registered image sizes is for experienced users, and care should be taken that the image size in question is not used on the site.

This tool shows both all registered image sizes, and image sizes that are currently not in use.

The ‘Unused image sizes’ section shows a list of all image sizes that are present on the site. This includes sizes for images that are in use. Deleting a registered image size will remove all images of that size from the uploads folder, including any that are in use.

In this case, the Media Library record will only be deleted if all copies of an image have been removed.

The ‘Unused image sizes’ section shows any image sizes that are currently not used by any images on the site.

Select any image size (from either section) that you wish to remove, and press ‘Remove selected sizes’.

Restoring images that were moved to trash

If you are not sure if you might still need the image, you can send it to trash, instead of deleting it permanently. You can view and restore these images by pressing the “view trash” button. 

Here you can restore any trashed images you want to keep by highlighting them and pressing the “Restore the selection” button. These images will now be sent back to your image library. 

We recommend taking a backup of the site before performing any optimisation with WP-Optimize Premium. WP-Optimize integrates with our backup plugin, UpdraftPlus. If UpdraftPlus is active on the site, the option to take an automatic backup before images are removed will be displayed in the tab.

The post How to delete unused images in WordPress using WP-Optimize appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.

Which of the leading contenders has the best optimization plugins for WordPress?

Optimizing a WordPress site is an essential process that can help speed up your site via caching, image optimization and database optimization. It can also improve performance and help you rank higher in search engines. However, as a customer, which one is the best? When looking for the best optimization plugins for WordPress, there are so many to choose from, it can be hard to separate fact from fiction – with all of them making wild promises to make your site faster than a hammer-time Lewis Hamilton!

In the below review, we will evaluate the performance by analyzing all the the top optimization plugins and show you why WP-Optimize should be your plugin of choice. 

What does ‘caching’ do?

An important part of the optimization process is caching. The term ‘cache’ or ‘caching’ refers to when there is a collection of data that is temporarily stored to allow for quick access upon request. Caching for a WordPress site works so that every time a user visits your site, WordPress will fetch previously viewed and stored information from the file system. By using cache, it allows visitors to skip the time consuming step of loading a site for the first time, as the caching plugin has made a copy of the site and presents this copy to the visitor when they return. 

How much of a difference can optimization make?

As optimization and caching reduces the load on your WordPress hosting servers, it can help make your website run faster. However, the optimization and caching for your site needs to be properly optimized and set up in order to get the most from a optimization plugin and help improve your site’s performance and speed.

If your site offers users a faster and more user friendly experience, it can help encourage users to return again in the future, visit more pages or more likely to make purchases. This in turn helps your user engagement time and reduces bounce rate. All of these factors combined (along with other metrics such as quality of content and how often your site is updated) can help boost your SEO score and drive more traffic to your site from organic search. A faster and more optimized site that includes caching and optimization can gain a significant SEO advantage from search engines such as Google, who prioritize and rank sites higher if a site is proven to be quick and maintains good user interaction. 

There are many WordPress optimization plugins out there that claim to help boost your website’s speed through caching, image optimization and database optimization. But which one is really the best?

How we tested the top optimization plugins

To make this test fair and completely aboveboard, a new, unbiased test site was set up. This test site is a basic WordPress site that contains lots of images and content that provides the simplest way to judge each plugin when evaluating its effects on a site’s speed test results when tested using GTMetrix.com. 

The test site

A 3GB sized test that has not been optimized or altered in any way to favour one optimization plugin over another. 

An example of the large scale images uploaded to our test site

Results

For the following speed test, we evaluated the 4 leading optimization plugins – WP Fastest Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP-Rocket and WP-Optimize, as well as a test with no optimization in order to have a base-line to evaluate performance.

Page Speed

PageSpeed ranking gives you an indication of whether or not your front-end (what the browser sees) adheres to best practices for optimal speed. The closer to 100, the faster and more optimized your site is.

YSlow

Like PageSpeed, your YSlow ranking can also be used to give you an indication of whether or not your front-end (what the browser sees) adheres to best practices for optimal speed, with 100 being the perfect score.

Page Size

Depending on your styling, your page could potentially be delivering larger/smaller images and hiding/revealing assets or resources. This impacts the load performance, so the small the page size, the quicker it will load.

As can be seen from the combined results, even the worst performing cache plugin can offer big improvements to a WordPress site. Without an optimization plugin, the average site is losing out massively in comparison to those that have been properly optimized.

In the interest of fairness and to ensure that our test wasn’t a one off or fluke, we also had another member of staff independently test the same optimization plugins on a different test site. The results that he presented below, largely mirror those that we also carried out.

Summary

Following our testing and in-depth analysis when looking for the best caching, image and database optimization plugins for WordPress, it is recommended that if you are looking for the most effective and best optimization plugin on the market, you should install WP-Optimize today as it shows the best overall performance figures of any optimization plugin. As can be seen from these results, WP-Optimize recorded the best loading page speed, ‘YSlow’ score and is very close to the top ranking for Page Size. 

WP-Optimize is easy to set-up and use and with just these few optimization techniques, it can help improve your site’s speed greatly. When evaluating WordPress site optimization, it is important to remember that a properly cached site will not only give visitors a better user experience, but can also help your site succeed via improved SEO score, bounce rate and repeat visits.

By using the WP-Optimize all in one optimization plugin, you will get everything you need to employ the latest optimization features for optimizing your WordPress website. 

Get a copy of WP-Optimize today and increase your website speed. Be sure to let us know your feedback in the comment section below.

The post Comparing the best optimization plugins for WordPress appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.

Thanks to the support of everyone that downloaded the WP-Optimize plugin, we are thrilled to announce that WP-Optimize has now achieved the massive milestone of 1,000,000 active installs.

This makes WP-Optimize the 52nd most installed WordPress plugin in the world (not including plugins that are pre-installed); a figure that is all the more impressive in such a competitive WordPress market and sector.

While there are several optimization and caching plugins on the market, WP-Optimize is the top ranked when users search for an ‘optimize cache plugin’ and has achieved a 5 star rating. This is a clear declaration of our continued efforts to make the plugin bigger and better and achieving recognition by the WordPress community as the market leading optimization and caching plugin. 

Even during these difficult times, everyone on the WP-Optimize team has continued to work hard to improve the plugin, while still providing support to give users the best possible optimization and caching experience and keeping the plugin up to date with the latest WordPress developments.

From everyone at WP-Optimize, we would like to thank all of our loyal users for getting us to this point. They always say ‘the first million is the hardest’, so a huge ‘thank you’ again and here’s to the next million!

The post WP-Optimize passes 1 million active installs appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.

WP-Optimize is our popular all-in-one WordPress performance and optimisation plugin that cleans your database, compresses your large images and caches your site. As you may have seen in our recent blog, in addition to these features WP-Optimize have now released a new Minify feature that can help make your website run even faster. This new Minify feature is all about increasing the speed of users’ WordPress site.

How does Minify work?

Minify works by combining and minifying the static assets of your website, including CSS and JavaScript files. By removing the unnecessary characters in these static assets, Minify deletes characters such as line breaks and white space from your website’s code; the deletion of which can help your site to load faster by further saving space. Minify also ensures that your files are merged into as few files as possible. This reduces the amount of load on your web server and can be quicker to load fewer files.

Users can also defer the loading of any CSS or JavaScript file. This means any large or extraneous CSS or JavaScript file can be loaded independently from the core of your WordPress site; giving users quicker access to your site.

WP-Optimize Minify has been built and designed to work seamlessly with your website and the overall WP-Optimize optimization process. By activating and using Minify, you should find that everything on your site still acts and behaves in exactly the same way that it always has, with the one difference being that it will now hopefully run faster due to the removal of all the unnecessary information.  

Is Minify easy to use?

We have designed the Minify feature to be easy to use regardless of a user’s level of skill and knowledge. For most people, all you have to do is toggle the main switch to “enable minify”. 

WP-Optimize will then automatically take care of all your minification needs. 

What if I have issues using Minify?

While simply just turning on Minify will get great results and be sufficient for most users, there will be a small number of users that may find that due to their specific website design, the appearance of the site may have altered. While the possibility of this happening will be rare, there is a very small chance it could happen. Should you find yourself in this position, just toggle the “enable minify” switch again to turn off the feature and your site will revert back to its original state. We then recommend visiting our support forum and ask for help on how to configure Minify to work on your site.

Individual control

With WP-Optimize Minify, you also have the option of adjusting the settings specifically for your website. To change the settings to best suit you and your site, you can go into the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, Fonts, Settings or Advanced tabs to change the settings, creating specific rules for your site.

Should you wish to undo any of the changes you made, we designed Minify so that any changes you may make will not be permanent and can be rolled back by just removing your changes. 

Using the Minify feature is completely risk free and is another important and proven way to speed up your page loading times.

We designed the Minify feature to be simple to use and intuitive. Just install WP-Optimize and start using it today.

The post WP-Optimize updated with new Minify feature appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.