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

Robina is a free, open-source booking and appointment plugin for WordPress, built for service businesses that want a capable booking system without subscription fees. It is service- and resource-centric: the bookable unit is a service with its own availability, while staff, locations and resources are optional layers you add only if you need them. Highlights Front-end booking widget (Vue 3). A clean multi-step wizard — Service, Date & time, Details, Confirm — added to any page with the [robina_booking_form] shortcode, or as a popup button with [robina_booking_button]. Capacity-aware availability. Slots are computed from your business hours, slot step and buffers. Assign staff to a service and each one adds a parallel slot; a staff member booked anywhere counts as busy. With no staff, a service has a single capacity per location. Group classes. Give a service a capacity above 1 (say 20 or 40 — there is no upper limit) and several customers can book the same session until it fills up — ideal for classes, workshops and large group sessions. Front-end class schedule. Show a public timetable of upcoming classes with the [robina_schedule] shortcode — visitors switch between an Agenda list and a Month calendar grid, each session lists the seats left and links straight into booking. Give a service a weekly schedule (e.g. Monday 18:00) in its editor to put it on the timetable. Staff (optional). Tag the people who provide a service, pin them to one or more locations, and give them their own weekly hours. When a customer picks a location, only the staff who work there are offered. Locations (optional). Offices or branches with their own optional weekly hours; each service declares where it is available. Native WordPress admin. A branded Catalog (services, categories, resources), a Month/Week/Day Calendar with in-place booking creation, plus Bookings, Customers, Staff and Locations screens — all in plain WordPress UI. Email notifications to the owner and the customer on every new booking, plus optional reminders a set number of hours before the appointment. Customer self-cancellation. The confirmation email carries a personal cancel link, so a customer can free their seat themselves — instantly bookable again by someone else. Set a cancellation window (e.g. up to 12 hours before) or switch it off. Days off and booking notice. Mark single dates a service does not run (holidays, a break) and close booking a set number of minutes before the start time. Optional online payments — Pay on site, WooCommerce, Stripe or PayPal (see “External services” below). Leave them all off for free bookings. Self-contained and private. No external CDNs and no trackers; the phone-input flags and every front-end asset ship inside the plugin. Uninstalling removes Robina’s tables and options. Service-centric by design Robina deliberately keeps availability on the service, not on a mandatory “employee”. Staff, locations and resources are optional capacity and scope layers, so Robina also suits non-staff models such as equipment rental or table booking. External services By default Robina works entirely on your own site and contacts no third party. It only talks to an external service when you, the admin, enable and configure a payment gateway, and only when a customer actually chooses to pay with it. No data is sent anywhere otherwise — Robina has no “home” server and sends no telemetry or analytics. Stripe — used only when you enable “Stripe” and enter your API keys. When a customer pays by card, Robina creates a Stripe Checkout Session and redirects the customer to Stripe’s hosted payment page, and it receives Stripe webhooks to confirm payment. Data sent to Stripe: the booking amount, currency, a short description and the customer’s email. Card details are entered on Stripe’s site, never on yours. Terms: https://stripe.com/legal — Privacy: https://stripe.com/privacy PayPal — used only when you enable “PayPal” and enter your client ID and secret. When a customer pays with PayPal, Robina creates a PayPal order, redirects the customer to PayPal to approve it, then captures it on return. Data sent to PayPal: the booking amount, currency and a reference id. Terms: https://www.paypal.com/legalhub/home — Privacy: https://www.paypal.com/legalhub/privacy-full WooCommerce (optional, local) — if you enable WooCommerce checkout and WooCommerce is installed, Robina creates a pending WooCommerce order and hands payment off to WooCommerce. Robina makes no external call itself; any outbound requests are made by WooCommerce and its own gateways under their policies. Map link — a location’s address is turned into a plain “view on map” link to Google Maps (https://www.google.com/maps/search/…). It is only a link: nothing is transmitted and no map is loaded unless a visitor clicks it. Source code Robina is fully open source (GPLv2+). The front-end widget is compiled with Vite from the Vue source that ships inside the plugin under /resources. The build files (package.json, package-lock.json, vite.config.js) are bundled too, so the compiled assets in /assets/dist can be regenerated from source with: npm install && npm run build Bundled third-party libraries (installed via npm, both MIT-licensed): Vue 3 (^3.4) — https://github.com/vuejs/core intl-tel-input (^29.0) — https://github.com/jackocnr/intl-tel-input

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.