Companion Auto Update vs Smush – Image Optimization, Compression, Lazy Load, WebP & CDN

Companion Auto Update is a powerful and completely free plugin that allows you to manage all the updates on your WordPress site. Our aim is to give you the best control over these updates and stay in the know at all times. We understand that you might not always be able to check if your WordPress site has any updates that need to be installed. Especially when you maintain multiple websites keeping them up-to-date can be a lot of work. This plugin can help you with that. We’ll keep your site up-to-date and keep you posted about what’s happening and notify you when we need your help with something. If you have a feature suggestion or idea you’d like to see in the plugin, we’d love to hear about it! Suggest a Feature Main features Auto-updating for plugins, themes, core and translation files Set at what time you wish to update Filter plugins and themes to not be updated E-mail notifications about old software, pending updates and completed updates An update log with all updates Option to delay automatic updates with an x number of days Full control over everything Full control, that’s what this plugin is all about. With this plugin you can enable (or disable) automatic updating for plugins, themes, WordPress core updates (both minor and major can be changed separately) and for translation files. Don’t want to run the updater for all plugins? Don’t worry, just disable auto updating for the plugins you’d like to skip and we can even notify you when there’s an update for these plugins so you can go and update them yourself. Scheduling By default we’ll check for updates twice a day but you can change this to several different options if you’d like. When choosing to update on a daily basis you can even select at what time you’d like it to run. Besides the updaters you can also schedule te notifications, want to update every hour but only recieve notifications once a day? No problem! Sometimes developers will push an update that will cause errors on your site, they’ll often fix it within a day but if the updater has run in the mean time it can cause all kinds of issues. Now you can choose to delay updates with an x number of days to prevent this from happening. Know what’s happening We want you to know what’s happening on your website. This plugin offers settings for various email notifications. We can send you an email when an update is available, when a plugin has been updated or when wordpress has been updated. But if you don’t want to recieve emails about this you can still log in and view the changelog to see what happened.

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.