A2 Optimized WP – Turbocharge and secure your WordPress site vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

Boosting performance and securing your WordPress site has never been easier with the A2 Optimized WP plugin from A2 Hosting. Get customized desktop and mobile performance scores for your site, including: Server speed (Time to First Byte) Page load speed (Largest Contentful Paint) User perception (First Contentful Paint) Visual stability (Cumulative Layout Shift) Website browser speed (First Input Delay) Using these scores, A2 Optimized WP generates specific, personalized recommendations for improving your site: Performance Security Best practices compliance With just a few clicks you’ll give your WordPress site the boost it needs with stable, industry-proven optimizations and improvements. Vulnerability disclosure program Performance optimizations Our plugin is optimized to work best in the A2 Hosting environment, so items marked with an asterisk (*) are only available for sites hosted at A2 Hosting. If you are not an A2 Hosting customer, join today! Page caching * Allows site visitors to save copies of your web pages on their device or browser. When they return to your website in the future, your site files load faster. * This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) and reduces bandwidth usage. Gzip compression * Turns on Gzip compression to make text files smaller. * This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) and reduces bandwidth usage. Redis object caching (*) * Stores commonly used elements such as menus, widgets, and database sets in memory. * This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB). Minify HTML pages * Removes extra spaces, tabs, comments, and line breaks from HTML pages. * This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID). Automatic database optimizations * Periodically cleans MySQL databases of expired transients (a type of cached data used in WordPress) as well as trashed and spam comments. Also optimizes database tables. * This optimization improves Time to First Byte (TTFB) for uncached pages. Compress images on upload (*) * Automatically compresses images when they are uploaded to your site. * This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP), Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), and First Input Delay (FID). Turbo Web Hosting (*) *Takes advantage of A2 Hosting’s Turbo Web Hosting platform to provide faster serving of static files, pre-compiled .htaccess files for improved performance, PHP opcode caching, and more. *This optimization can improve multiple benchmarks. Use system cron instead of WordPress cron (*) * Replaces the WordPress virtual “cron job” with a genuine, system-defined cron job. * This optimization reduces the load on WordPress and ensures scheduled tasks run at precise, correct intervals. Minify inline CSS and JavaScript * Removes extra spaces, tabs, comments, and line breaks from inline CSS and JavaScript. * This optimization improves First Contentful Paint (FCP) and First Input Delay (FID). Disable WooCommerce AJAX Cart Fragments * Disables WooCommerce AJAX Cart Fragments on your homepage and enables the “redirect to cart page” option. * This optimization improves WooCommerce performance. Security optimizations Our plugin is optimized to work best in the A2 Hosting environment, so items marked with an asterisk (*) are only available for sites hosted at A2 Hosting. If you are not an A2 Hosting customer, join today! Lock editing of plugins and themes from wp-admin * Prevents misuse of built-in editing capabilities for the WordPress admin. Change login URL (*) * Changes the login page URL from the default wp-login.php to a random URL. * Helps prevent bots from brute-force attacking your login page. Add CAPTCHA for comments and login (*) * Adds a CAPTCHA to comment forms and login pages to deter bots from posting spam comments and running brute-force attacks.. Block unauthorized XML-RPC requests * Rejects XML-RPC requests except for whitelisted services, such as Jetpack. Deny direct access to configuration files * Displays a “403 Forbidden” error when visitors or bots try to access WordPress configuration files. Best practices recommendations Regenerate wp-config salts * Generates new values for wp-config.php salts and security keys for increased security. Recent post limit *Checks the number of recent posts per page, which should be less than 15 for most sites. RSS post limit * Checks the number of posts in RSS feeds, which should be less than 20 for most sites. Recent posts showing on home page * Checks whether the home page displays recent posts, and offers to use a static page instead for faster performance. Permalink structure * Checks that the permalink structure is configured to fully optimize page caching and get additional SEO benefits. Unused themes * Checks if there are any non-default, unused themes that should be deleted. Inactive plugins * Checks if there are any inactive plugins that should be deleted. Hosted with A2 Hosting * Checks if your site is hosted with A2 Hosting for faster page load times and more optimizations.

Compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load automatically with the powerful Smush image optimizer to keep your WordPress site fast, without losing quality. Smush makes it easy to optimize images, compress images, and deliver images faster across your entire WordPress site. This all-in-one image optimizer automatically reduces image file sizes, enables image lazy load, and serves modern formats like WebP and AVIF, all without breaking image quality or adding extra work. Whether you’re running a blog, store, or portfolio, Smush helps you optimize images at scale and keep your site fast with a trusted WordPress image optimizer. Trusted by 1+ Million Sites | 4.8/5 Star Rating Get everything you need to optimize images and speed up your site. Smush works out of the box with no complicated setup – just install and let it handle the rest. Compress images without losing quality Reduce image file size automatically while keeping your images sharp and clear. Smush is an easy-to-use image optimizer which let’s you compress images using both lossless and lossy compression, giving you the best balance of quality and performance without extra work. You can also compress images outside the media library using Directory Smush, making it easy to optimize images stored in theme folders, plugins, or other directories on your server. Lazy load images for faster pages Enable image lazy load across your site so images load only when needed. This image optimizer improves initial page speed and creates a smoother experience for visitors without extra configuration. Serve WebP and AVIF images automatically (PRO) Convert images to WebP and AVIF and serve them automatically to supported browsers. Smush helps you optimize images using next-gen formats to reduce file size and improve load times across your WordPress site. Deliver images faster with an Image CDN (PRO) Serve images through a global image CDN to reduce latency and improve load times for visitors around the world. 119 global CDN servers Up to 500 GB of bandwidth Faster image delivery based on visitor location Improved performance for image-heavy and high-traffic sites Automatically resize and fix image dimensions (PRO) Eliminate common PageSpeed warnings and improve layout stability with automatic image sizing. Smush dynamically resizes images to perfectly fit their containers, regardless of original size, helping fix the “Properly size images” warning in Google PageSpeed Insights. It also automatically adds missing width and height attributes to your images, improving rendering speed and reducing layout shifts. This helps you meet the “Ensure images have explicit width and height” recommendation without any manual work. Optimize your entire site, automatically Smush works across your whole site as a powerful image optimizer to optimize images as you upload them and maintain performance over time without manual work. Optimize images automatically on upload Compress images in bulk or individually Works with your existing media library No need to re-upload images Enable image lazy load across your site Convert images to WebP and AVIF Deliver images with an integrated image CDN Automatically resize and serve correctly sized images Optimize images outside the media library with Directory Smush Built for performance Smush improves page speed and overall performance by reducing image weight and improving how images are delivered. Reduce page load times Improve user experience Better performance for image-heavy pages Supports image lazy load and preload images (PRO) for faster perceived performance Works with your existing setup Smush is built to work with your current WordPress setup, including popular themes, page builders, and plugins. Compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, WPBakery, and more Works with WooCommerce stores No need to change your workflow Easy to enable and configure Designed to be simple You don’t need to be a performance expert to optimize images with Smush image optimizer. Works out of the box Simple settings when you need them No technical knowledge required Safe to use on any site Why choose Smush? There are plenty of image optimization plugins, but Smush focuses on making it easy to optimize images, compress images, and improve performance without complexity. As a leading WordPress image optimizer, Smush gives you powerful optimization tools without the technical hassle. Trusted by over 1 million WordPress users Built specifically for WordPress Regular updates and improvements Backed by the WPMU DEV team Get started in minutes Install Smush, activate it, and start to compress images, optimize images, and enable image lazy load right away. This easy-to-use image optimizer helps most sites see improvements immediately without changing how they upload or manage images. About Us WPMU DEV is a premium supplier of quality WordPress plugins, services and support. Learn more here: https://wpmudev.com/ Don’t forget to stay up to date on everything WordPress from the Internet’s number one resource: WPMU DEV Blog Hey, one more thing… we hope you enjoy our free offerings as much as we’ve loved making them for you! Contact and Credits Originally written by Alex Dunae at Dialect (dialect.ca, e-mail ‘alex’ at ‘dialect dot ca’), 2008-11.