Imagify vs Smush: Is The Best Image Compression Plugin For WordPress

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Last Updated on 12 months by Komolafe Bamidele


Keeping our site’s performance in peak shapes is one of the keys to its success. That includes that optimizing your pictures with the best Image Compression so they are not draining on your website’s resources.

Though, it can be difficult to pick among the top tools for doing so – such as deciding among Imagify vs. Smush! These 2 WordPress Plug-in allow you to optimize your pictures simply and even customize the way the procedure works.

What is more, using a plugin means you do not have to go searching for an external solution. The whole of these photo optimization tools can get the job completed, but each has its individual exclusive set of pros and features.

In this best Image Compression review, we are going to briefly explain why optimizing your WordPress images is an intelligent move.

Image Compression

Then we also, compare Imagify vs. Smush to help you make the best option for your website.

Why It Is The Smartest Choice To Optimize Your WordPress Website’s Images?

Images are key to nearly every site. The boost your website’s appearance can be utilized to show off your work or products, and a whole lot more.

Though, the more photos you have on your website, the more work a visitor’s has to do in order to load its web pages. This is because the photo file size can be fairly huge, and all that data adds up rapidly.

Image Compression

Consequently, your website can be slow down as you add media to it – which is detrimental to retaining and attracting visitors. The solution, as you might have guessed, is optimization.

Imagify vs Smush: Best Image Compression Full Comparison

When you optimize your website’s images, you are making their file sizes smaller and less of a burden. At the similar time, this can be accomplished without a noticeable elimination in the picture’s quality.

Fortunately, what you need to accomplish this is the correct WordPress plugin – which is why we are comparing Imagify vs. Smush in this post.

Imagify vs Smush: Best Image Compression Full Comparison

We are going to look at these 2 well-known images optimization WordPress plugin: Imagify vs. Smush. Though, if you are in a rush, let’s break down the main details about each tool upfront.

The whole of these stats refer to free versions of plugins. Before we can look at the comparison between Imagify vs. Smush, we need to introduce them. Let’s take a quick look at these:

Imagify

Imagify Image Compression

First up, Imagify; this plugin offers various levels of compression, so you can achieve a good balance among quality and performance.

It also optimizes Retina images and thumbnail, which is a bit good touch.

Smush

Wp Smrush Image Compression

Next, we have Smush is perhaps the most well-known image compression plugin for WordPress site. This tool is designed by the team at WPMU DEV and boats a few powerful servers to pare down your photos rapidly.

It is also compatible with a huge range of medial library enhancement plugins, which can be a helpful bonus.

Comparing Best Image Compression Key Features And Pricing

In a very basic sense, these 2 plugins do nearly the same thing. They all compress your photo so they are less of a drain on your website’s performance while attempting to maintain as best quality as possible.

In addition, these tools will both compress your existing images, and any new ones you upload.

This can make it a bit confusing when you try to compare Imagify vs. Smush and pick a winner. However, each somewhat offers different feature set, but Smush is way ahead than Imagify.

Imagify Best Image Compression – Key features:

  • Optimize thumbnail, images and Retina Images from WP Retina 2x
  • Select from 3 levels of compression
  • Store your original size image in a secure backup

Pricing:

The free plugin lets you optimize 25 megabytes (20 images) of data each month, while the premium plans start at 5 USD each month for one GB of data (1000 images).

Smush WP Whereas

Smush – Key features

  • Set maximum dimension for your website’s images and uploads will be automatically scaled down when essential.
  • Compress pictures in any folder on your site, not only your medial library.
  • Optimize GIF, JPEG, and PNG images one at a time or in bulk quantity (up to 50 pictures at once)
  • Convert PNGs to JPEGs automatically, keep duplicates of your actual sized images as a backup, to pictures up to 32 mp (paid plan only)

Pricing:

The Smush Pro version offers tons of extra feature, simplifying the job of image optimization and offering you a lot more customization than imagify. Though, you’ll need a membership in order to access it, which will cost you 49 USD each month.

Comparing Performance And Ease Of Use

Now, we have seen what both plugins have to offer in theory, let’s take deep look at what it is like to actually use Imagify vs. Smush. In this section, we are going to walk-through how to optimize a picture using the free version of Imagify and Smush plugin.

Imagify Best Image Compression

  • Installing this is not quite enough to get plugin working – you will need to take one further step. Under setting > Imagify you will need to generate and enter a free API Key.
  • Simply enter your mail ID to create a free account.
  • You will then be taken to your plugin dashboard, where you can customize the setting of the plugin. You can optimize your images here if you wish. Alternately, take the API code in the mailbox you received after signing up for a profile and enter into your WP dashboard. This will give you access to a similar option with WordPress site itself:
  • If you pick the automatic option, you just need to upload an image in order to optimize it. When you do, you will see some info about how much the file was compressed.
  • The compression procedure was extremely fast in this example, though the file size only compressed by 2%. As an outcome, the quality has not changed.
  • The same applies to your PNG photo.
  • The reduction here was just 3 percent and again there is no real change in quality.

Imagify Cons

All in all, Imagify fares relatively poorly when compared to the Smush. It had no real effect on our test images and does not offer a way to customize the level of reduction. For that, you need the paid version instead.

Smush Images Compression

  • After activating the plugin, you will rapidly get some options to customize how the image compression function works. Then you’ll be taken right to the plugin’s next tab:
  • Here you can bulk reduce your existing images if you want. You can also turn the automatic feature on or off for the specific type of photo, and decide whether they should be resized up upload:
  • You will be able to pick whether to auto-optimize and back pictures set a maximum size for images, and so on. If you keep the auto feature on, you will only need to upload image to your media library, and let the plugin do the job:
  • We select the medium setting, aggressive and tested out a result for both JPEG and PNG files uploaded to our test website:
  • Plugin compressed the image by 40% and the quality has been decently maintained.
  • There is a slight blurring in the image, but it is widely unnoticeable.

Now, for the PNG test:

  • This one reduced by 35% and the reduction in quality is also slight. There is a difference, but a not terribly significant one.
  • All in all, the plugin did great job of compressing our test images, weight without much impacting their quality.

Why Audiences Have To Use Smush Instead Of Imagify?

Smush is a free image optimization and compression plugin for WordPress.

Smush is maintained by the best folks over at WPMU DEV and is led with tons of features, including bulk smush, lossless compression, incorrect size image detection, and automatic optimization, to name a few.

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Now any time you add a new image to media library, it will automatically run through the plugin service, reducing the file size, without much loss in quality.

One of the main reasons why everyone should upgrade to Smush plugin is that it can optimize all of the existing pictures on your website without you having to re-upload them (limit of 50 images without paid plan).

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