Smush is already the Coca-Cola of image optimization (even her competitors call image optimization Smushing). And now there’s even more to love; more compression (5MB!) for free with better 50-image-smushing alongside a CDN upgrade and expanded 3rd-party support for Smush Pro users.
She’s the true standard for making all the images in your WordPress media library fast, clear, and stunning.
It’s no wonder she’s trusted to optimize nearly 350 images per second, that’s 30 million images per day and 35.9 billion images as of this post going to press. But who’s counting 😉
This year brought the most significant upgrades to our heroic optimizer.
- CDN (For our pro users)
- WebP Conversion (Also pro)
- Lazy Loading (included free)
- Image Resize Detection (Free to everyone)
- And, Automatic Image Resizing (for our pro members)
New Features For Free & Pro Users
With the free version of Smush, every image you upload is automatically optimized with her award-winning lossless compression improving PageSpeed, making more space on your servers, ranking you higher in Google and saving you time and money.
And as you know we’re big fans of making things as free and open as possible and with your feedback, we’ve found two new opportunities to give everyone a chance at more savings.
- We’ve upped our free compression for images from 1MB to 5MB
- Smush free now optimizes 50 images at a time even more smoothly than it did before with a nice UX upgrade
In addition, WPMU DEV members will find more fine-tune controls across their Smush Pro interface including a bolstered CDN and upgraded Lazy Loading.
For example:
- Toggle control over which thumbnail sizes to compress with the custom image size selector
- Lazy Load can now be turned off for specific post types and now individual images by class
- Want to restore the uncompressed versions of all your images? Smush now has a bulk restore option
- We upgraded how images are detected and processed to improve performance all around
- We’re constantly working to ensure Smush is the right choice for every setup. With this release Smush gets upgraded compatibility with Revolution Slider and 3rd-party Lazy Loading Support together with improved compatibility for WPBakery Page Builder, ACF, SiteGround, GoDaddy and Bluehost
So let’s dive in and see how the new features in Smush 3.2.1 are extending your advantage when it comes to image optimization for on your WordPress websites.
Compress any Image up to 5MB Absolutely For Free
Smush has always offered everyone free and unlimited compression on any 1MB or smaller image. Talk about big-time resource savings for millions of users across billions of images.
Today we’re giving everyone an upgrade! A 500% upgrade! Now you can Smush any image up to 5MB using her secure and powerful servers. That should cover not only your thumbnails but just about any file you send her way.
Do it Bulk and Undo it Bulk
Now to resolve a hot ticket and give our members something to smile about by introducing a much requested feature to the Pro version… bulk undo!
If you’ve ever wanted to undo Smush compression on one or two images it’s not a huge deal but for a cluster of images or your whole image library, it can be daunting. Not anymore. Now Smush comes with the option to bulk revert your images to the default WordPress compression.
Automate by Thumbnail Size
Did you know when you upload a single image to your site, by default, WordPress creates 3 file sizes? Depending on what theme or plugins you use this can quickly jump to 5 or 10 images? Think about it, when you upload 3 images WordPress may actually generate 30 different image files… and each one of those image files can be optimized automatically by Smush.
But we’ve taken Smush automated optimization control a step further.
Now you can set what size thumbnails to include or exclude from being compressed. Nice!
Maybe your managing a photoblog and you want all the small and medium images optimized but need to exclude a large full-res preview version that is uncompressed and preserves all the meta-information. Now you can.
In the settings section of the Bulk Smush module switch image sizes from All to Custom. Then choose the file sizes you want to exclude from automatic Smush. For most users the default All is perfect but if you run into special use cases now you have the power to choose.
Lazy Load Image-by-Image
If you missed it, Smush 3.2 was packaged with Lazy Loading. This lets you load images as there being scrolled into view on your browser.
This important and awesome new feature came with the ability to choose what pages you wanted to Lazy Load. Now you can actually set what specific images you want to Lazy Load.
In the Lazy Load module, under the Include/Exclude setting scroll to Classes & IDs and your image ID.
In the block editor, you can give your images custom classes by spinning open the advanced setting of your image block and giving it a class. So much power!
It’s the Little Things (and the Big Things)
With 45 new features, improvements and bug fixes the little things can tend to get overshadowed but we’ve worked really hard on both the big ticket items and the smaller upgrades to our user experience, performance, and 3rd-party compatibility.
It’s the things that make everything run smoother and are never noticed when “they just work”… and that is Smush – it just works.
So give yourself and your clients the gift of the most powerful user-friendly image optimizer for WordPress. You deserve it. Grab Smush for free or get Smush Pro and try our complete all-in-one WordPress platform for free for 30 days.
