BoxCart – Local Pickup & Click and Collect Ordering vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

BoxCart is a standalone click and collect ordering plugin for WordPress. Give your customers a polished pickup-ordering experience with configurable time slots, a modern card-view storefront, customer accounts, and a built-in admin dashboard – all without WooCommerce. Whether you call it local pickup, click and collect, store pickup, or order ahead, it is the same idea: customers order online and collect in person, at a time that suits them. BoxCart handles the whole flow, from storefront to time slots to order management, without the weight of a full e-commerce platform. Built for: farm shops, bakeries, butchers, delis, greengrocers, fishmongers, florists, coffee roasters, pizza shops, meal-prep kitchens, and any business where customers order ahead and collect. What you get in the free build Click & collect ordering with configurable time slots on your pickup schedule. One pickup location with its own address, collection instructions, opening hours, and per-slot capacity. Card-view storefront with category filters, search, and mini-basket. Sell by unit, weight, or pack – offer multiple quantity options per product, such as single units, 500g, 1kg, or a 6-pack. Customer accounts with order history, plus optional up-front registration. Admin order management with a status lifecycle (pending, processing, ready, completed, cancelled). Order export to CSV from the orders screen, filtered by date, status, and location. Transactional email templates (order confirmation and status updates) with branding controls and a live preview editor. Plus a new-order admin notification. Cash on collection and bank transfer payment methods. 5 Gutenberg blocks and 5 shortcodes for embedding BoxCart anywhere – products, basket, checkout, account, mini basket. Developer-friendly – 50+ action hooks and 35 filter hooks, CSS custom properties throughout, zero external PHP dependencies. Cache-resilient – pages render as empty shells that hydrate via AJAX, with a bypass cookie for customer sessions. Compatible with Cloudflare, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed, and similar. Translation-ready with a .pot file included. GDPR-aware – self-hosted fonts, optional full data cleanup on uninstall. Why BoxCart? Standalone – no WooCommerce required. A single, focused plugin with its own data model. Time-slot ordering baked in. Configure your schedule, slot length, and capacity. Customers see live availability. Developer extensible – documented hooks, filters, and CSS custom properties. Not a stripped-down demo – the free build is a complete, working click & collect store. Paid Pro upgrade (optional) A paid Pro build is available from boxcart.dev with additional features: Multiple pickup locations Stripe card payments (with Apple Pay, Google Pay, Link, Klarna, PayPal, Afterpay) Table-view storefront Members-only pricing (hide prices and the add-to-cart button from logged-out visitors) Customer favourites and one-click reorder Two-way order messaging Customer-side order modification Holiday closures and per-date capacity overrides Printable pick lists & packing slips Sales reports CSV product & category import/export 195+ customisation settings Pro is optional – the free build will continue to receive updates and is genuinely useful on its own. Live demo Three demo stores at demo.boxcart.dev – a greengrocer, a bakery, and a butcher – each configured differently to show the range of what BoxCart can do. Documentation Full documentation at docs.boxcart.dev covering every admin workflow and the developer API. External Services This plugin uses the Freemius plugin framework (https://freemius.com/) for optional anonymous usage tracking, licence handling for the paid Pro upgrade, and update delivery for Pro customers. Freemius is a well-known WordPress plugin distribution platform and the integration is entirely standard. What data is sent, and when: When you activate BoxCart, you are shown an opt-in prompt asking whether to share anonymous usage diagnostics. You can skip the prompt – the plugin works either way. If you opt in, Freemius receives: your site URL, admin email, WordPress version, PHP version, plugin version, activation/deactivation events, and non-personal environment data (e.g. active theme, locale). You can opt out at any time from BoxCart → Account. If you purchase the Pro upgrade, Freemius also handles your licence key, renewal state, and update delivery for the Pro build. BoxCart never sends your customers’ data, your orders, your products, or the contents of your store to Freemius or anywhere else. Endpoints contacted: api.freemius.com, wp.freemius.com. Freemius’s own privacy policy and terms: https://freemius.com/privacy/ https://freemius.com/terms/

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.