Activities vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

Activities is a free, light-weight plugin for managing activities. It provides an easy to use interface to manage your sites activities and who is participating. This plugin supports multisite installations. Each site has their own activities, locations, activity archive and plugin settings. The heart of the plugin is the Activity Report. When using the Activity Report it is easy to manage different recurring activities like yoga courses, football training and a lot of similar group oriented activities. The plugin integrates beautifully with WooCommerce Products. For example, when a customer is buying participation on a yoga retreat the customer are at the same time assigned the Activity list for this particular retreat. Activities Activities has name, start/end dates and two description of different sizes. They can also be assigned a location, they are created separately for easy reuse. If you have plans for the activity, they can be created separately and be reused on unlimited activities. The plans can be viewed on the activity report page. In addition each activity can have a responsible user who can be granted access to view and/or edit their assigned activities. Activities can be archived to get a ‘history’ and reduce the amount of activities on the ‘main’ list. Activity Report This plugin comes with a report page where you can get an overview of the activity and its participants. The report is a static structure, but has a lot of customization options for its content. In addition to specific report settings, the ‘Activities > Options > Activity Report’ page you can set a generic setting for all reports. Export and Participant Communication The export page allows you to copy participant information from an activity. It currently supports exporting email, phone and names. For example it can be used to send emails to all participants by copying the email list it provides and pasting it into a email program or webpage. Shortcodes A simple shortcode is provided to display activity information in blog-posts, products or other types of posts. Also comes with an option to display a join/unjoin button/link/image on posts. And status image to display different text/image whether user is participating or not. Check the FAQ on how to use it. Responsible Users Usually users would be granted permission to use a plugin based on their role. With this plugin you can grant users permission to only view and/or edit their assigned activities. This will naturally not restrict access for other users who have higher permissions based on role. WooCommerce Activities has a good integration with WooCommerce. Products can be assigned with any number of activities, when a user buys the product and the order is set to Completed they will be added to the activities assigned to products bought. Guets customers who buy any product can be converted into a WordPress user and then be assigned to activities. Importing Activities comes with a simple import feature. The import system only takes CSV files and expect them to be semicolon separated. Both activities and participants can be imported.

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.