Smush has gradually established itself as one of the best automatic image compression solutions available on WordPress with over 5 billion images " smushed "(compressed) and 1624 votes for five stars which certainly does not lie. As a novelty, the plugin offers tools advanced compression, and that's what we'll talk about in this tutorial.
Say hello to the automated transformation of PNG to JPG files for the files that need it.
Here's what Smush has allowed you to do so far:
- Better compression with loss
- Auto resize and scale unnecessarily massive images
- Creativity SEO making pages much faster
- Compression that lets you save more than 32 Mo see more
- Fully automated management of your entire library and new additions
Now it now checks all your PNG files and if further savings can be made without losing quality, it turns them into JPG!
Read our tutorial on How to use SMUSH.
And, of course, you can choose to keep the originals if you do not trust this compression.
Let's go into the details of this awesome new feature.
Image coding and optimization is a deeply technical subject. The basics applied for this update hold that the PNG file format is perfect for large images with low complexity, such as logos, graphics and icons, and most of the time screenshots as well. If you save a photograph in PNG format however, you are hurting because the JPEG format is better for photographs and its compression is even better.
So what does all this mean? This means that Smush has now added a transmutation of superpowers to their roster, but more importantly, it means you don't have to worry about how you save your footage, because if you do it wrong, Smush will. will take care of correcting the errors.
Several cuts to his credit
The WPMUDEV team has just celebrated the 5 billionth image compression through compression servers. This is almost 17 terabytes of disk space that has been saved by reducing the size of the images.
Imagine how many times these compressed images have been downloaded by browsers, and how much bandwidth on the internet have been preserved.
Expected savings
To test the potential of this feature, I went to find a huge file. I chose this picture with this puppy.
What will happen if I capture this screen? It will be saved as a PNG image, but with massive photographic details. Well, even knowing what must happen, I'm surprised!
I will not delve into the details. Let's agree that using the PNG format to save this image is an error.
This is an extreme example, but it's meant to show you that you should exercise caution when using screenshots on your site. Ask yourself if your image is a logo or a photograph?
So what happens when the image is compressed with Smush?
I'll spare you the screenshots, but:
- JPEG optimization for 9,6% compression.
- Screenshot of the original for 71,3% compression
What should this mean to you?
Inevitably, when taking screenshots across the web sometimes you need to include some photographic detail. Most of the time, there will be much less detail than in the previous test, and if it is very minor, there may be nothing to be gained from a compression that converts to JPEG. Otherwise, Smush will take care of saving you space.
Have you used this feature before? What was your opinion? Please feel free to share it with us.
