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Smush Pro is a plugin for your WordPress website. It will allow you to optimize the images on your website without sacrificing image quality.
A major issue with websites that feature images is that loading the images often takes longer, which causes the website to load slower.
Websites have a speed score on a scale of 0-100. If your website scores 90 or above, your speed is excellent.
Slow speeds start to become an issue when your site scores between 50 and 89.
This means that your website should load appropriately without issues, but there is plenty of room for improvement.
If your speed score is less than 50, you should strongly consider tools like Smush Pro because you run the risk of your website timing out before it can complete the loading process.
At the very least, your website may still load, but without the images, you spent so much time adding.
What is Smush Pro?
Smush Pro is a plugin for your WordPress website. It will allow you to optimize the images on your website without sacrificing image quality.
Smush Pro can optimize in real-time for both old and new photos on your website. When you optimize your images, you will be able to increase your speed score and make your website users happier in the process.
Smush Pro Cost
The pro version is $60 for an annual subscription for one website. If you need optimization for multiple websites, there is a $140 a year subscription that is good for up to 20 websites.
For large companies with more than 20 websites to manage and optimize, an annual plan costs $290, which grants optimization for an unlimited number of websites.
If you are not ready to invest, Smush does offer a free version that allows you to optimize unlimited photos, but there are two significant limitations.
First, each image can only be up to 1MB in size. Second, you are limited to only one option for optimization; lossless.
Smush Pro CDN
CDN stands for content delivery network, and it refers to a physical group of servers in different geographic locations that store and send internet content to your devices.
CDNs help to keep your website from being slowed down by lots of bulky extra content like super large images by storing them on the servers.
You can enable the Smush Pro CDN via the user interface, and it will run in the background automatically until you disable it.
Overall Rating and Review
Smush Pro has a 4.8-star review on WordPress with over five thousand customer reviews.
Many users rage about how user-friendly this plugin is and how well it works. With just a few clicks, you can set Smush Pro to automatically optimize old and new images that you add to your website.
One of the most praised aspects of Smush Pro is the customer service that the company that created the plugin provides for every customer, no matter which plans they are using.
Many users expressed how pleased they have been with the technical support they received anytime they had a problem.
Smush Pro Alternatives
Smush Pro is not the only option available for image optimization plugins to add to your WordPress website. Kraken and Ewww are two other options that do similar functions.
Kraken
Kraken is a WordPress plugin that allows you to compress up to 50MB of images with a free account. Once you have used all 50MB, Kraken offers five different plans ranging from a micro plan that costs $5 a month for 500MB of images to $79 a month for 60GB of images.
Each plan offers an option for additional storage space, but prices vary based on the plan.
Compared to Smush Pro, Kraken seems to be significantly slower at processing images.
At times, Kraken took nearly twice as long to process the same or similar images that were also compressed with Smush Pro.
In terms of cost, both Kraken and Smush Pro are relatively equal in upfront prices. Kraken does offer the addition of storage when needed with additional fees, which Smush Pro does not seem to offer.
Kraken also has five paid plan options, where Smush only offers three paid options. With more choices in plans and the amount of storage for image processing, you can be a bit more flexible in choosing the program that is closer to your needs and can help you save a bit more in the long run.
Ewww
Ewww is quite different from both Kraken and Smush Pro. You can think of it as a pay-as-you-go plan. Instead of paying a fixed monthly or yearly fee, you can pay $1 upfront, and then you pay based on the number of images you choose to optimize.
The first $1 you spend gets you 200 credits, then for the first 1,000 images processed after that will cost you $0.005 per image.
1,001 to 5,001 images that you process will cost $0.004 per image.
5,001 to 10,000 images that you process will cost $0.003 per image.
Any number of images processed beyond 10,000 will cost $0.002 per image.
Ewww is probably the most inexpensive of the three plugins, especially if you are processing a large number of images every month.
However, the simplicity of Ewww is somewhat problematic because it seems to be lacking in processing power, and the percentage of compression is almost not worth the effort required to install the plugin.
Is It Worth It?
Though there are alternatives to Smush Pro that may save you a bit of money, Smush Pro is still a top contender for image optimization plugins that work hand-in-hand with WordPress.
Its user-friendly user interface allows you to easily do things like enable and disable the Smush Pro CDN. One of its most significant selling points is the amount of information on the user interface.
You can see things like the number of images’ smushed’, which refers to how many images you have compressed and optimized.
It will also show you the amount of space you are saving by using the Smush Pro plugin.
In the end, it is safe to say that if you are looking to improve your speed score, provide a better and faster website for your users, and do it without stressing yourself out, Smush Pro is something to consider using.
The quality of a plugin is generally a matter of opinion. However, there is a consensus that Smush Pro is a pretty good quality plugin.
As a general rule, anytime you are installing a plugin and applying automatic adjustments to your website, you must know that malfunctions are always a possibility. However, based on general customer satisfaction, yes, Smush Pro is safe to install and use.
Smush works in two ways. First, it automatically compresses all of the images you have uploaded to your website’s media library. Then it uses the WPMU DEV servers to store your pictures to prevent too much bulk from building up in your website’s database storage, which allows it to load faster.
Lori Ballen is a real estate agent in Las Vegas. She’s a digital marketing specialist, speaker, and marketing coach and loves to share her “Ballen Method” to generate website traffic and leads online. Lori’s specialties are SEO content writing (ranking on the search engines), social media strategies, and affiliate marketing. Need a website? Contact Lori’s brothers Jeff and Paul Helvin at Ballen Brands.
