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

The AI plugin brings AI-powered features directly into your WordPress admin and editing experience. Requires the WordPress Block Editor. The Classic Editor plugin and other non-Block Editor editing experiences are not supported. What’s Inside: This plugin is built on the AI Building Blocks for WordPress initiative, combining the AI Client library and Abilities API into a unified experience. It serves as both a practical tool for content creators and a reference implementation for developers. Current Features: Abilities Explorer – Browse and interact with registered AI abilities from a dedicated admin screen. AI Request Logging – Logs AI requests for observability and debugging. Alt Text Generation – Generate descriptive alt text for images to improve accessibility. Comment Moderation – Automatically moderate comments based on toxicity detection and sentiment analysis. Connector Approvals – Require explicit administrator approval before plugins or themes can use AI connectors configured on this site. Content Classification – Suggests relevant tags and categories to organize content. Content Resizing – Shorten, expand, or rephrase selected block content. Content Summarization – Summarizes long-form content into digestible overviews. Content Translation – Translates paragraph and heading blocks, and optionally the post title, into a selected language from the post editor. Custom Abilities – Gates the plugin’s general-purpose WordPress Abilities behind a single opt-in toggle. Dashboard Widgets – AI Status and AI Capabilities widgets, plus framework for registering new ones. Editorial Notes – Reviews post content block-by-block and adds Notes with suggestions for Accessibility, Readability, Grammar, and SEO. Editorial Updates – Automatically apply editorial notes to content. Excerpt Generation – Automatically create concise summaries for your posts. Experiment Framework – Opt-in system that lets you enable only the AI features you want to use. Guidelines – Allows abilities to respect site-wide editorial standards. Image Generation and Editing – Create and edit images from post content in the editor, also via the Media Library. Key Encryption – Encrypts AI provider API keys at rest using bundled libsodium encryption. Keys are transparently decrypted on read and re-encrypted on write. Disabling the experiment or deactivating the plugin restores plaintext keys. Meta Description Generation – Generates meta description suggestions and integrates those with various SEO plugins. Multi-Provider Support – Works with AI Connector plugins for providers such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Slug Generation – Suggest SEO-friendly permalink slugs for your posts from the permalink popover or the pre-publish panel, then edit and apply the one you want. Suggest Reply – Adds a “Suggest Reply” action to the Comments screen and Activity widget, enabling moderators to quickly generate comment reply suggestions. Title Generation – Generate title suggestions for your posts with a single click. Perfect for brainstorming headlines or finding the right tone for your content. Type Ahead – Contextual type-ahead assistance for suggestions while typing. Provider Setup: The AI plugin does not include provider credentials or provider implementations by itself. To use AI-powered features, install and activate at least one AI Connector plugin, then configure its credentials in Settings -> Connectors. Features may appear unavailable until a connector is installed, authenticated, and capable of the required operation. Provider connector plugins include Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and others. Coming Soon: We’re actively developing new features to enhance your WordPress workflow: AI Playground – Experiment with different AI models and providers. Content Assistant – AI-powered writing and editing in Gutenberg. Site Agent – Natural language WordPress administration. Workflow Automation – AI-driven task automation. This is an experimental plugin; functionality may change as we gather feedback from the community. Roadmap: You can view the active plugin roadmap in a filtered view in the WordPress AI GitHub Project Board. For Developers The AI plugin is designed to be studied, extended, and built upon. Whether you’re a plugin developer, agency, or hosting provider, here’s what you can do: Extend the Plugin: Build Custom Experiments – Use the Abstract_Feature base class to create your own AI-powered features. Pre-configure Providers – Hosts and agencies can set up AI Connector plugins so users don’t need their own API keys. Abilities Explorer – Test and explore registered AI abilities (available when experiments are enabled). Register Custom Abilities – Hook into the Abilities API to add new AI capabilities. Override Default Behavior – Use filters to customize prompts, responses, and UI elements. Comprehensive Hooks – Filters and actions throughout the codebase for customization. Developer Tools Coming Soon: AI Playground – Experiment with different AI models and prompts. MCP (Model Context Protocol) – Integrate and test Model Context Protocol capabilities in WordPress workflows. Extended Providers – Support for experimenting with additional or alternate AI providers. Get Started: Read the Contributing Guide for development setup Join the conversation in #core-ai on WordPress Slack Browse the GitHub repository to see how experiments are built Participate in discussions on how best the plugin should iterate. We welcome contributions! Whether you want to build new experiments, improve existing features, or help with documentation, check out our GitHub repository to get involved.

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.