Klix Image DimSum vs Transient Cleaner

Addicted to speed. Heck, who isn’t. Squeeze out better performance with little effort. And get a shot at a higher Google ranking. Search engines, notably Google introduced speed in their ranking algorithm a few years ago. Yet, the average site runs above 10 seconds to the user. Big guns like Facebook, Twitter and Google deliver their site in under 2 seconds to the user. Yours should shoot for the same performance. A lot of sites suffer in speed tests because large images really slows down the delivery of a website. Specifically, many sites serve huge images when they’re viewed as tiny thumbnails by the user. Caching can significantly speed up WP, but if you’re delivering elephants then caching elephants can only do so much. DimSum turns those big elephant images into ones that are small and quality-controlled. And it does so in real-time. This plugin resizes all blog images (home, post and pages) to their tagged width and height, and changes the compression for a perfect balance between quality and speed as seen fit by you, the site owner. It makes elephants into bite-sized dimsum whenever possible. Results include not only increased performance but also increased site aesthetics and ease of use. A) Performance issues include faster page delivery. Speed increases range from minor to significant, depending on the mis-matching of underlying file to that image seen by the user in the browser. It’s particularly useful for front pages that don’t use official thumbnail features but embed smaller representations of larger images. Optimizing large content is often the best way of increasing page delivery. As a corollary, DimSum decreases bandwidth usage which is important for (cloud) users who pay per usage. B) Ease of use improvements are significant. Use an image without regard for its size. Which means no endless sizing in Photoshop or GIMP. One image is resized to perfectly suit each different page use in real-time. Moreso, don’t rely on the few thumbnail sizes given to you by your theme. Generate any size you want without disturbing your site delivery time. Save in the highest quality in Photoshop/Gimp. Upload and then downgrade in DimSum until a perfect tradeoff between quality and size is found. And, in WordPress, select the perfect size to match your content, using the 90%, 80%, 70%, 60% … scaling in the post area. Finally, within seconds crank up or down the compression quality setting to suit the number of visitors (and thus server load) your site receives to better address your customer’s needs — until you upgrade to a faster server. Because one drowned server can ruin your day. C) In the aesthetic department, images are not stretched out beyond their viewable resolution. In fact, images are perfect WYSIWYG between image on the filesystem and image in the browser, in terms of resolution and size. Nevertheless, nothing can increase quality beyond that found in the original file, so use the highest quality in the first upload.

Clean expired transients from your options table. The original and best! Transient housekeeping was added to the core of WordPress after version 5.8. However, I have decided to open up this plugin to all versions to allow for manual transient cleaning. Longer term I am working on a new version of the plugin, designed specifically for all WordPress releases. Tested up to PHP 8.2 Fully complies with WordPress coding standards Compliant with the stronger WordPress VIP coding standards, as well as compatibility with their platform Community plugin – visit the Github page to get involved with the latest code development, request enhancements and report issues “Transients are a simple and standardized way of storing cached data in the WordPress database temporarily by giving it a custom name and a timeframe after which it will expire and be deleted.” Unfortunately, expired transients only get deleted when you attempt to access them. If you don’t access the transient then, even though it’s expired, WordPress will not remove it. This is a known “issue” but due to reasons, which are explained in the FAQ, this has not been adequately resolved. Why is this a problem? Transients are often used by plugins to “cache” data (my own plugins included). Because of this it means that expired data can be left and build up, resulting in a bloated database table. Meantime, this plugin is the hero that you’ve been waiting for. Simply activate the plugin, sit back and enjoy a much cleaner, smaller options table. It also adds the additional recommendation that after a database upgrade all transients will be cleared down. The Settings Screen Within Administration -> Tools -> Transients an options screen exists allowing you to tweak when you’d like cleaning to happen, including the ability to perform an ad-hoc run, and when you’d like the to be automatically scheduled. You can even request an optimization of the options table to give your system a real “pep”! Running in Lite mode A “lite” mode is available. By activating this the options screen will no longer appear and default settings will be used. The advantage? Improved performance to Admin and, especially if you’re running multi-site, no chance of anybody “tinkering” with the settings. To activate, use the following… define( 'TC_LITE', true ); This should be added to your wp-config.php file. Using hooks If you’re the type of odd person who likes to code for WordPress (really?) then I’ve added a couple of hooks so you can call our rather neat cleaning functions… housekeep_transients – this will clear down any expired transients clear_all_transients – this will remove any and all transients, expired or otherwise Acknowledgements I’d like to thank WordPress Developer Andrew Nacin for his early discussion on this. Also, I’d like to acknowledge the useful article at Everybody Staze for ensuring the proposed solution made sense, and W-Shadow.com for the cleaning code. Iconography is courtesy of the very talented Janki Rathod.