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

Crawler Record logs the last time specific user agents (for search and AI chat/LLMs) accessed your content including: Google Bing ChatGPT (OpenAI) Claude (Anthropic) Perplexity DuckDuckGo Meta Apple Common Crawl You can view this information: Admin page: a grouped list of all crawlers, with last seen time, last page, and robots status for the crawler. Admin Bar (front-end): quick-glance status for the current singular or URL context (no dropdowns in wp-admin). Per Page/Post: From the edit screen on any page or post, you can see that last time each crawler visited that page. Recent Pages: From the admin page you can select a crawlwer and get a list of the recent pages this UA has visited. Robots-aware: The plugin checks your robots.txt and evaluates Allow/Disallow rules for a given path. If Settings → Reading → “Discourage search engines” is enabled, all agents are shown as blocked with a prominent warning. Performance-friendly by design: Write-throttling (default 10 minutes) and an auxiliary “last post ID per agent” record avoids heavy admin queries on large sites. Privacy-friendly: Saves only bot visit timestamps and last URLs crawled — no personal data. Learn how to use this plugin. Highlights Supports common user-agent variants for Google, Bing, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), Perplexity, Meta, Apple, DuckDuckGo, and Common Crawl. Robots status computed from local robots.txt (physical or virtual) without outbound requests. Clear UI with grouped sections, microsecond timestamps, and a small diagnostics toggle showing the matched robots group and rule. Known limitations Can only track crawlers from the time the plugin is installed- cannot look into the past. robots.txt wildcards (*) and end-of-line marker ($) are not interpreted; matching is prefix-based only. Future versions may add full spec support. To reduce database load and avoid slowing the website, bot tracking is throttled, so not every crawler visit will necessarily be recorded. Privacy This plugin stores: – Timestamps of crawler visits (float, with microseconds) – Last URL seen per crawler (per-URL records) – Last post ID per crawler (for admin performance) It does not collect or store personal data about site visitors. No data is transmitted to third parties. License GPLv2 or later. See LICENSE file.

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.