BigCommerce For WordPress vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

BigCommerce for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to scale ecommerce further than ever before on WordPress. Scale your business with WordPress on the front-end and free up server resources from things like catalog management, processing payments, managing fulfillment logistics and more with BigCommerce on the back end. Built to integrate seamlessly with WordPress, you get access to our native ecommerce features from a single plugin, the ability to sell across multiple channels and marketplaces from a single location, and best of all, an embedded checkout experience that takes on PCI compliance and customer security on your behalf. Quick Start! Look at details from the latest release, including new features and enhancements here: https://github.com/bigcommerce/bigcommerce-for-wordpress/releases Dive into how you set up and customize your site using BC4WP using our guides here: https://developer.bigcommerce.com/bigcommerce-for-wordpress/getting-started/introduction Have a suggestion for how we can be better? Ping the team! [email protected] DIFFERENT FROM YOUR TRADITIONAL PLUGIN We’ve taken a very different approach to ecommerce in WordPress. We set out to build our plugin the WordPress Way: deliver value to the community, build it with WordPress experts and make something developers can call their own. The BigCommerce for WordPress plugin leverages the best aspects of both platforms, allowing WordPress to manage content and BigCommerce to manage ecommerce. SCALABLE ECOMMERCE FOR WORDPRESS Continue to tap into the unrestricted customization of WordPress while pairing it with the most scalable SaaS ecommerce engine. BigCommerce lets you build complex catalogs, manage large volumes of concurrent traffic, orders and analytics. The BigCommerce plugin ports over a copy of your product catalog and stores products as custom post types in WordPress. It also creates pages for your cart, checkout, account profiles, sign in, shipping & returns, gift certificates and order history. The key difference to our approach is that you don’t need to install additional extensions to get access to common ecommerce features. Instead, you get instant access to many common (and advanced) features, such as complex catalog support, global payment gateways, currency handling, taxation, shipping calculations and centralized channel management; all out-of-the-box. OFFLOAD BACKEND RESOURCES Our philosophy is that processing orders and running your store shouldn’t affect the uptime and speed of your site — which can hurt your SEO, conversion, and brand. The BigCommerce plugin does the heavy commerce lifting, letting you scale your ecommerce without losing speed or uptime. LET US HANDLE PCI COMPLIANCE Taking on your own PCI compliance comes with a huge amount of liability and risk. BigCommerce powers the full checkout experience, assuming the burden of PCI compliance for you. EXTENSIVE PAYMENT GATEWAYS BigCommerce has over 65 payment gateway integrations available out-of-the box, serving 100+ countries and over 250 local payment methods. To help you reduce costs, we’ve pre-negotiated special credit and debit card processing rates with PayPal, our preferred payment solution. The more you grow with BigCommerce and upgrade your plan, the lower your rates can go. HIGHLY SCALABLE PRODUCT CATALOG BigCommerce is built for large, complex catalogs with up to 600 SKUs per product, and 250 product values for a single option. Our native catalog structure treats single products (including variants, details, SKUs, etc.) as a single API call, making inventory syncing with ERPs, PIMs (and WordPress) fast. MULTI-CHANNEL SELLING & MANAGEMENT With the core BigCommerce platform, you now have access within the control panel to sell across multiple marketplaces simultaneously, such as eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google Shopping, Square and more! Save time and eliminate errors and overselling with bulk listing, automatic inventory syncing and unified order and fulfillment management. USE YOUR FAVORITE WORDPRESS THEME BigCommerce for WordPress will work with any WordPress theme, but it may require some styling to make it fit perfectly. Are you a theme developer? We’d love to promote your BigCommerce for WordPress compatible theme. Get in touch with us here. To start, we recommend choosing a cross-browser compatible WordPress ecommerce theme, since the theme options included will better match what an online store requires. ECOMMERCE WITH GUTENBERG We’re big supporters of Gutenberg and built our plugin to support both the classic editor and Gutenberg. Whether you’re inserting shortcodes in classic mode or product blocks in Gutenberg, we will continue to enable support for both. SECURED USER ACCOUNTS & LOGINS In addition to offering you peace of mind with a secure checkout experience, we also extend this level of security to your shoppers, their accounts and logins, and payment information — all managed by BigCommerce. GLOBAL SHIPPING STREAMLINED We support all major global carriers, offer real-time carrier quotes, allow for free shipping, flat rates, dropshipping and more. With our deep ShipperHQ integration, you can even specify rates by product, category, customer group, quantity, destination, dimensions and more. FLEXIBLE SHOPPING CART We are bringing over a decade of focusing on building online stores to every WordPress website. Through this we bring our flexible shopping cart, along with it’s extensive customization options, so can offer enterprise grade promotions and discounts within a fully responsive layout, without additional extensions that other WordPress ecommerce plugins require. MULTIPLE SITES; ONE CONTROL PANEL Even if you sell across multiple WordPress sites, you shouldn’t have to manage them all in separate places. BigCommerce gives you a single control panel to manage your catalog, orders and shipping, all from one place. Streamline your admin experience and spend less time managing ecommerce on WordPress. Beyond WordPress, the endpoints we’ve opened on our platform allow you to build commerce into any sort of experience. Looking to launch a site in React? Interested in developing a mobile app? Want to integrate with an in-house POS? All of these can be built and managed from within the BigCommerce Control Panel. COMPLEX ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS INTEGRATIONS A huge benefit of having a SaaS ecommerce engine behind the scenes is that the core platform is already built for mid-market and enterprise use cases. Natively connect to your existing ERP suites, PIM software, OMS solutions, POS systems or marketing automation tools right out of the box. AMP SUPPORT Unique to most WordPress ecommerce plugins, BigCommerce for WordPress also includes support for Accelerated Mobile Pages. To activate, install the official Google plugin. SUPPORT AND SERVICES All of our BigCommerce customers have access to our 24/7 live phone, chat, and email support, run from our headquarters in Austin, Texas. For larger enterprise customers, we offer dedicated account management and implementation management services as part of your plan. We also have an ever-growing collection of help, support, and how-to guides in our help center. BUILT WITH DEVELOPERS IN MIND BigCommerce for WordPress was built by WordPress developers, with developers in mind. Our plugin is open source and available for you to fork, extend and modify as your needs require. Our plugin supports WordPress’ standard method of overriding template files so you can modify out-of-the-box designs. Customize your product cards, lists and shopping cart without risking plugin updates that will undo your changes. Additionally, there are many hooks and filters, so you can manipulate content to your heart’s content. JOIN OUR BIGCOMMERCE COMMUNITY All BigCommerce customers get access to our ever-growing online community to answer questions, discuss ecommerce strategies, learn about the latest product updates, contribute ideas and more. If you’re interested in contributing to BigCommerce for WordPress, head over to our GitHub Repository.

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.