by Wayne Mullins | Feb 16, 2021 | WP Optimize, WP-Optimise
The latest updates for WP-Optimize 3.1.7 have now been released – including the preload key request feature. We have taken a lot of time and effort to launch these new improvements and hope that they further help improve users’ experience of WP-Optimize.
When aiming to improve the speed of your WordPress site using WP-Optimize, one of the new features we have released with this update is the ability to preload key requests. Preload key works by using an audit to identify which resources to preload on your WordPress site. The browser will then preload resources so they are available immediately when needed, preventing eventual waiting time later on, making your site load faster. Google’s pagespeed insights will often suggest preloading the requests to font files and other assets as a speed improvement:
With the latest WP-Optimize Premium release, you now have the ability to manually add any resource you want to be preloaded:
As can be seen in the Google PageSpeed insight test, preloading key requests can result in massive time savings when visitors are loading your site.
In order to get the URL to add to WP-Optimize, just right click on the resource and copy the URL:
Next, past the URL in the ‘New Asset’ box of the ‘Preload key requests / assets’ section of WP-Optimize and press ‘Add’.
The URL you added you will be added to your preload key requests.
The updates to WP-Optimize 3.1.7 also includes the following:
WP-Optimize: 3.1.7
- FEATURE: Premium – Preload key requests (Preload fonts and other assets)
- FIX: Detecting Brotli compression issue
- FIX: Cache – PHP Warning in URLs to exclude from caching
- FIX: Premium – Unused images – Unused Images Tool not recognising Greek characters
- FIX: Button for disabling Gzip doesn’t showing
- TWEAK: Database optimization – Prevent fatal error due to files missing
- TWEAK: Skip minify when SCRIPT_DEBUG is set to true
- TWEAK: Fixed Font-awesome settings
- TWEAK: Add support for different spellings of “Font-awesome”
- TWEAK: Update the feature comparison table
- TWEAK: Added the option to not show the warning before deleting a table
- TWEAK: Wipe all options upon plugin de-installation
- TWEAK: Premium – Lazy-load – Lazy load support for background images
- TWEAK: Minify – Add file size in the minify cache summary
- TWEAK: Detect conflicting plugins for GZIP issue
- TWEAK: Database optimization – Include all tables if database prefix is not set on WP install
- TWEAK: Premium – Unused images – added “X of X images loaded” for unused trash images
- TWEAK: Don’t allow to remove actionscheduler_ tables
- TWEAK: Premium – Unused images – Show a progression screen when doing any action with unused images
- TWEAK: Cache – Enable cache for the old default permalink structure domain.com/index.php/a-post-name by creating a folder without the extension
- TWEAK: Show previous action as message on Trackbacks or Comments enable or disable.
- TWEAK: Prevent deprecation notice on PHP 8.0
- TWEAK: Update notices
by Wayne Mullins | Jan 19, 2021 | WP Optimize
Many websites can accumulate hundreds, if not thousands of images over time. Having all these images on your site in their original uncompressed format can cause frustratingly slow website loading speeds, which can impact on a website’s user experience, bounce rate and SEO performance.
One of the best ways you can improve the speed of your site is by optimizing your images using WP-Optimize. This process, which is commonly known as ‘smush’ or ‘smushing’ allows users to optimize, compress and resize all the images on a website, potentially saving many MB per image and improving loading speeds. This feature is available on both the free and premium versions of WP-Optimize.
How to optimize your images
Step 1
Once you have installed the WP-Optimize plugin, click on WP-Optimize>Images in your WordPress dashboard. Now you can decide what level of compression you would like to have for your images. There are 3 options:
- Prioritize maximum compression
- Prioritize retention of detail
- Custom
By prioritizing ‘maximum compression’, the more space you can save and the quicker your website will load due to it now having smaller and quicker loading images. However, if you run a wedding photography website for example, you may not want to compress your images fully as there can be a slight drop in image quality the more an image is compressed. While the loss in quality is hardly noticeable for most people and is not a consideration for most websites, if high end quality images are important to you, then you should prioritize ‘retention of detail’. This option will still save reduce the image file size (though not as much as ‘maximum compression’), but will maintain the high quality of the original. You can also select ‘custom’, if you would like to format your images to a level that is not quire maximum compression of best image quality.
Step 2
Below the settings options, you will see all the uncompressed images that have been uploaded to your website. Here, you can manually select individual images you wish to compress, or press the “Select All” button if you want to compress all the images to the same level. As previously mentioned, if you have high quality images that you do not wish to fully compress alongside other images that may not be so important, you can individually select them and run a ‘maximum retention of detail’ compression. You are then able to run the ‘maximum compression’ option on the remaining images.
Step 3
WP-Optimize also gives you ‘advanced options’ when compressing your images. Here you can choose option such as:
- Preserve EXIF data – Handy for professional photographers that may require the EXIF data at a future date.
- Backup original images – Don’t worry if you make a mistake or want to revert back to the original image. WP-Optimize gives you the option to retain a backup.
- Automatically delete image backups – Once you have compressed your images, you can set a date for when you want your backup images deleted. This helps prevent your site from storing large original files that are no longer needed.
- Delete all backup images now – If you are happy with the results and want to delete all your backed-up images, just press this button and WP-Optimize will do the rest.
- Mark all images as uncompressed – Use this option if you want to compress your images again, or make further changes.
- Restore all compressed images – If you decide that you no longer want your images compressed or have made a mistake and still the original in your media library, you can restore all of your compressed images to their original state.
Step 4
Once you have set up and decided what kind of image compression you are happy with, you can tick the “Automatically compress newly-added images” button so that you do not have to go through the process every time you upload a new image. Once you activate this option, every new image you upload will be compressed according to the settings you have chosen (compression or detail).
If you would like to read more information on the benefits of compression versus detail, be sure to check out the following blog that goes into more details and explains the benefits of both: Lossy vs Lossless image compression – A guide to the trade-off between image size and quality.
We have also put together a video of how to optimize your images.
by wpoadmin | Apr 12, 2019 | WP Optimize
As mentioned in our previous preview blog, we have been hard at work developing a new image compression tool for the latest WP-Optimize 2.3.0 (free + paid) release. Our image compression service is an easy to use and handy imaging tool that allows you to quickly and easily optimise, compress and resize images on your website.
How the image compression option will look in WP-Optimize
As unnecessarily large website images can cause frustratingly slow website loading speeds, we identified the need for a new image compression tool within WP-Optimize. Large images can impact on a websites user experience, bounce rate and SEO performance, but with our new image compression options you can improve these factors without compromising quality.
How Image Compression Works
By using the best-in-class Lossy and Lossless compression techniques; WP-Optimize can offer massive savings in image file size and saves the new compressed file in your image library.
If you have a lot of images on your website, you can also use our bulk editing option to compress as many images as you want at the same time – or even set-up ‘Auto-Compress’, which enables you to set WP-Optimize to automatically compress your images as and when they are uploaded.
In order to achieve big savings and increase speed, WP-Optimize gives you the option of choosing either Lossy or Lossless image compression. When using image compression methods, you may find that there may be a slight loss in image quality, but rest assured it will hardly even be noticeable. The Lossy compression method can achieve greater space savings when compared to Lossless, but Lossless compression allows you to keep file data and the original image quality.
For more information on the difference between Lossy and Lossless compression and what kind of results you can expect with WP-Optimize, be sure to check out our in-depth recent blog on this subject.
WP-Optimize doesn’t limit you and will let you work with your favourite kind of images, allowing you to compress NG, JPG, GIF, BMP and TIF pictures up to 5mg in size. Our image optimisation service even allows you to backup your original files so you can quickly restore them in case you make a mistake or need the original full quality image.
You can also be assured that should you wish to remove the WP-Optimize plugin for whatever reason, your compressed images will remain unaffected, allowing you to keep all your new and original content and maintain full control over your website.
Be sure to let us know any feedback comments you may have in the comment section below.
The post WP-Optimize announce release of new leading image compression feature appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.
by wpoadmin | Apr 9, 2019 | WP Optimize, WP-Optimise
With the launch of WP-Optimize’s new smushing image compression feature, many people may be unaware of the advantages and disadvantages of the Lossy and Lossless compression methods. This blog will explain in detail what kind of results and savings you can expect to achieve with each compression format.
Lossy Compression
The most popular image compression for most users is Lossy, which can be categorized as achieving greater space saving compression (compared to Lossless), but losses some of the data and image quality from the original image in the compression process. While you can save more data with Lossy, the data saving isn’t completely without cost, as with increased compression comes a slight increased degradation in the image quality and the inability to you reverse the compression, which results in the permanent loss of file metadata.
You should choose the Lossy method of compression If you are purely trying to reduce the size of your images and save data. But remember that the advantage of smaller files will be tempered by the small reduction in quality in your images and the permanent loss of metadata.
This isn’t to say that your new compressed image will resemble a digital camera photo from 2002 however. The image will still be very high quality and present as a professional and clear image, but you may start to get some compression artefacts appear with high levels of compression.
With Lossy compression enabled, the below image was compressed from 230.26 KB to 64.92 KB, giving an almost 75% reduction in size.
Original JPEG image
How image looks converted with Lossy compression
Original image zoomed in 300%
Lossy image zoomed in 300% – 230.26 KB to 64.92 KB, a 75% reduction in size
Lossy Summary
Pro – Can reduce the images to small sizes and save lots of file data, making your website load quicker and perform better.
Con – The smaller you make the file size, the lower the quality of your original image. Deletes original image data permanently.
Lossless Compression
Lossless is a term that refers to a class of data compression algorithms that compresses your image, but allows the original data to be restored and reconstructed from the compressed file data should you ever need it. Lossless compression differs to Lossy by maintaining the original image quality, while reducing the image data size by removing unnecessary meta-data from the submitted files (usually JPEG or PNG files). The main benefit of this type of compression is that the user has the ability to keep all the original data and revert to the original image, but can still achieve a smaller file size, without sacrificing image quality.
As previously mentioned, one of the main benefits of Lossless compression is being able to keep and restore every single bit of data that was within the file after it is uncompressed. This is in contrast to Lossy compression, where metadata is not saved during the compression process and results in data being unable to be restored should you wish to reverse the compression.
As a Lossless image will only temporarily delete the file data, this allows it to be transferred quicker, which results in faster loading speeds for your website. While the amount of space you will save is not as much as if you were to use Lossy compression, it does give you higher quality images and the option to fully restore should you need it.
With Lossless compression enabled, the below image was compressed from 230.26 KB to 172.18 KB, giving just over 25% reduction in size.
Original JPEG image
Converted with Lossless compression. Every pixel is identical to the original image – only the file size is smaller
Original image zoomed in 300%
Lossless image zoomed in 300% – 230.26 KB to 172.18 KB, a 25% reduction in size
Lossless Summary
Pro – Decreases image file size but maintains original quality of image. Full restoration of data available.
Con – Using Lossless compression results in larger files sizes in comparison to Lossy compression, which can result in slower loading speeds.
Custom
We understand that some users may wish to decide their own balance between maximum compression and best image quality. With the custom option, you can manually choose which settings your prefer for image compression and save them for future use.
Overall Compression Summary
Making a choice between Lossless or Lossy compression depends on what you want to achieve and what works best for your site and users. In general terms, if you have a website that needs to showcase high quality photographs (such as a wedding photography business), you should stick to Lossless compression as it will still display your images in their original highest quality. But if your site is for a local garage for example, where the highest quality images are not so important, Lossy compression could work best as original high quality photos are not essential to the success of your business.
The post Lossy vs Lossless image compression – A guide to the trade-off between image size and quality appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.
by wpoadmin | Mar 13, 2019 | WP Optimize, WP-Optimise
We are pleased to announce that we have released an updated version of WP-Optimize 2.2.13 for both free and paid versions.
The latest update includes a few fixes and tweaks that we hope will make your WP-Optimize experience even better.
We recommend the update for all WP-Optimize users.
The full changelog is as follows;
- FIX: Fixed RTL layout
- FIX: Detect more relationships between tables and plugins in orphaned database tables optimization
- FIX: Fixed orphaned relationships optimization
- TWEAK: The informational list of WP core tables missed some possible extra tables on multisite
The post WP-Optimize 2.2.13 new update released appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.
by wpoadmin | Mar 8, 2019 | WP Optimize, WP-Optimise
Page Speed is the foundation to a great online shopping experience. Of course an excellent user experience with an eye-catching store is essential, but page speed is the most crucial benchmark for any WooCommerce website. Just a one second delay can result in the user deciding they have had a bad user experience and create a loss of trust in the brand, which can lead to abandoned carts and increased bounce rates. This results in not just a potential loss of a sale, but far more importantly, a dissatisfied customer.
When queried on how long it should take a site to load, 47% of customers expect a load time of around 2 seconds. When it comes to WooCommerce, the chances of slower page speed is higher as there is a constant influx of new, updated products and categories being processed. While these updates are happening in the background, your database and server space is continually increasing, which can slow down your site.
At the time of writing this article, the WP-Optimize free version plugin has more than 800,000 active installations. There is also a premium version available that includes additional features and tools for optimizing your website and WooCommerce store. We are continually working hard to make the plugin better and help solve real-world problems our users are facing in terms of site optimization.
The need for optimization
As time passes, your WordPress database can become unwieldy due to the garbage data it accumulates with each passing day. WP-Optimize removes this useless data, freeing up valuable megabytes while also increasing speed and efficiency. This plugin can also clean up your comments table, removing all the spam and un-approved comments that have built up – with just with a single click.
WP-Optimize also gives you the option to use lazy loading for your WooCommerce store. Lazy loading is a function that allows your site to only load parts of a web-page when they are visible to the user, which results in faster loading pages. This allows the user to instantly start viewing the visible sections of the site, rather than wait for all the images and information on the page to load.
Please note: It is highly recommended you first perform a backup of your site and WooCommerce store with UpdraftPlus before you start setting up the optimization process.
Optimize your WooCommerce Store
To get started, get your copy of WP-Optimize and install it on your WordPress site.
Next, head over to the WP-Optimize>Settings page. Under ‘Database’ you will see pre-selected options for optimization. Keep all pre-selected options as they are and click the ‘Run all selected optimizations’ button.
If you would prefer to run each optimization separately, WP-Optimize also provides a ‘Run optimization’ button next to each option.
Next, under the ‘Images’ section, you will see the orphaned image list ‘Unused images’. If you do not plan to use these orphaned images, then deleting them can save you valuable server space. To delete them, just select the images you wish to delete and hit the ‘Remove selected images’ button.
The final feature we recommend using is the previously mentioned ‘Lazyload’ feature, which can help you speed up your WooCommerce store. To enable this setting, click on the ‘Lazyload’ tab and tick both ‘Images’ and ‘Iframes and Videos.’
Conclusion
Speeding up your website can help your customers save time by making their purchases quicker and easier, resulting in happy customers that are more likely to return in the future and recommend your site to others. Try out the techniques techniques discussed and be sure to let us know how you get on in the comment section below.
The post How to make your WooCommerce store run faster with WP-Optimize appeared first on UpdraftPlus. UpdraftPlus – Backup, restore and migration plugin for WordPress.
Recent Comments