WordPress Plugins for Lawyers: Smush It

In 2014 everything is starting to become more about SPEED and how fast your site loads.

Google has made a lot of comments about making sure  your site loads quickly and that it is Mobile Friendly.  There are a number of things you can do to make sure your site loads quickly, including making sure you dont use that many large sized images. Yet if you are going to use images, make sure they are optimized and load as quickly as possible.  If you are running wordrpess, then the plugin of Smush It is a very useful plugin that will help optimize your images and hopefully make your site load a little quicker.

How does it work?

Every image you add to a page or post will be automatically run through Smush.it behind the scenes. You don’t have to do anything different.

Existing images
You can also run your existing images through Smush.it via the WordPress Media Library. Click on the Smush.it now! link for any image you’d like to smush.

As of version 1.4.0 there is a new, experimental Bulk Smush.it feature. You can find the link under the Media Library tab.

You can see below that some of the images have been reduced in size. This can add up if you have a lot of images in your site.

Errors
Sometimes the Smush.it service goes down or is under heavy load. If the plugin has difficulty connecting to Smush.it then automatically smushing is temporarily disabled (currently for 6 hours). You can always re-enable it via the Media > Settings screen or manually smush the image from the Media Library.

Yahoo’s excellent Exceptional Performance series recommends optimizing images in several lossless ways:

stripping meta data from JPEGs
optimizing JPEG compression
converting certain GIFs to indexed PNGs
stripping the un-used colours from indexed images
Smush.it offers an API that performs these optimizations (except for stripping JPEG meta data) automatically, and this plugin seamlessly integrates Smush.it with WordPress.

Download the Smush it Plugin here…