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

Finally, A/B Testing & Personalization Built for WordPress You spend hours creating content, but are you sure it’s working? Every headline, button, and image you publish is a guess. Wasted traffic and lost sales are the cost of guessing wrong. Accelerate eliminates the guesswork. It’s the native CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) platform that puts the power of A/B testing and personalization directly inside the WordPress Block Editor. No more expensive SaaS subscriptions. No more complex integrations. Just data-driven results. While Accelerate is still in beta, we have released the following features. What Can You Do With Accelerate? Run A/B Tests on Any Block: Create multiple versions of your headlines, calls-to-action, or images and let Accelerate tell you which one performs best. Know exactly what works. Personalize Content for Different Audiences: Show unique content to visitors based on where they came from, their on-site behavior, and more. Deliver the perfect message every time. Understand Your Content with Block-Level Analytics: See exactly how people interact with your site on a block-by-block basis. Our GDPR-compliant analytics gives you actionable insights you own completely. Promote Content Site-Wide with Broadcast Blocks: Instantly advertise new offers or important announcements across your entire site from one central location. Manage Everything from a Marketer’s Dashboard: Our Content Explorer gives you a single, unified view of your content performance. Built for the Modern WordPress Creator Accelerate is designed from the ground up to be seamless. It integrates directly with the tools you already use, including Synced Patterns (Reusable Blocks), to supercharge your workflow. Important Beta Information: Accelerate is in active development (beta). We invite you to be one of our first users and help shape the future of WordPress optimization. To power our analytics engine, a free account registration is required upon installation. All data is securely hosted in the EU and is 100% GDPR compliant. FAQ How do I use Accelerate? Please refer to our User Guide for Accelerate during our beta phase. How is the analytics data hosted? During this beta phase, all data is stored in the EU (specifically in Frankfurt, Germany). We may offer other jurisdictions in the future — please let us know if you have any requests with regards to jurisdictions .Data is never shared with third parties, or transferred out of the region. Everything is hosted at AWS and automatically deleted after 90 days. All data collected by Accelerate is subject to the European GDPR regulations, as processed by Human Made Ltd, a UK registered company. Accelerate is business-to-business software, and contractual terms including consent may apply per your contract. We automatically collect business-level usage data under the terms of these contractual agreements, and you can choose to opt-in to providing personal data to help us make our product better. Data about your visitors is automatically collected by Accelerate to power analytics and personalisation features, based on the visitor’s opt-in status. What’s Changed Onboarding: fix misleading connect copy and harden account unlink by @noeltock in https://github.com/humanmade/accelerate/pull/692 Allow asset-loader ^1.0 so the plugin can install on Altis 27 by @joehoyle in https://github.com/humanmade/accelerate/pull/693 Full Changelog: https://github.com/humanmade/accelerate/compare/4.3.2…4.3.3

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.