WPMU DEV Smush Pro Plugin Review

WPMU DEV Smush Pro Plugin Review

When you're using Wordpress, you might realize your site loads slowly if you have a lot of images.  Well, I came across the WPMU DEV Smush plugin and decided to give it a try.  I installed it on my large multi-vendor eCommerce site that sells physical products to see how well it would perform, and I was pleasantly surprised.

I thought that WPMU DEV was a 100% paid service but realized I could use their Smush plugin for free on my website.  I was able to Smush 50 images at a time, which took a while because I had a decent amount of them, but after doing this manually, it was helping a lot.  I decided to upgrade to the pro version, smushed my images even more, and saved even more space because I put everything on their CDN.


Before I installed and used the Smush plugin, my website was loading around 16 seconds per page, which everyone knows is extremely bad.  The page size was a little over 14mb, which again is horrible, but along came the Smush plugin to the rescue!

*NOTE*  My PageSpeed and YSlow aren't the best, but at least my site loads quickly lol

Below is an image of my results after using the free version of the WPMU DEV Smush plugin on my marketplace.

As you can see, my page load times were almost cut in half, and the page size was drastically reduced to 4.19mb.  Now, most people wouldn't be excited about these numbers, but I was since I was dealing with 16 second loads times and 14mb pages lol.


After upgrading to the pro membership on WPMU DEV I was given access to all the premium plugins, not just Smush Pro, and I started to use them.  I also had the option to upload all of my images to the WPMU DEV CDN, which I took full advantage of! 


I went into more of the features on Smush Pro and resized any large images, smushed my directories, super smushed what I could, converted PNG's to JPEG's, and set the plugin to smush any new images that were uploaded since I have it on a multivendor type site.

I used Smush Pro at first, but then I used Hummingbird Pro to help speed up my website as much as possible.  These two plugins pair well together, and here are the results:

*NOTE*  I also switched my hosting from a shared NameCheap plan to a Gold level WPMU DEV Hosting plan with dedicated resources.  I would have paid $50 a month for this, but I get a $30 credit towards hosting since I'm a premium member, which means I only pay $20 for my awesome server

If you compare this image to the first one, I posted you will notice that my PageSpeed and YSlow increased slightly, but my page speed and page size were a homerun!  My pages now load at 3 to 4 seconds on average, and my page sizes are under 1.5mb lol.


Here's a quick glimpse of what my results were after using WPMU DEV's Smush Pro plugin for Wordpress

(your dashboard will look a little different.  I removed a lot of white area to fit this image better)

I had almost 80% total savings on my images, which means they were slowing my website a staggering amount.


In conclusion,
I recommend using Smush Pro or even the free version named Smush if you have a Wordpress website and want to speed it up a bit.  I'm sure you could get your load times under two seconds per page if you have a smaller site.  Remember, my pages were a staggering 14mb before I started optimizing, which is enormous compared to most websites, so you might have better results than I did.  I'm not even done optimizing yet; I still have to go through a few more settings on their other plugins to see if I can get under three seconds per page load times lol.


Thanks for reading!

- Tommy
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey