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Hummingbird Image Score Still Low After Smush Image Compression

Hello – I've compressed all images in my media library using Smush, but am still getting a 6/100 on image compression. Hummingbird is recommending I compress several images, but these images are already compressed (I don't have the option to do so again) according to Smush.

Google Page Insights is also penalizing us badly for images so I believe this issue relates to the compression itself, not hummingbird.

Wed, 1 Feb 2017 17:34:50
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  • Alex Stine
    • System Administrator

    Hello Sean

    Hope you are well today!

    Could you please enable support staff access so I can view your current WP Smush Pro configuration? This should better help me to troubleshoot what is going on with your installation. For more information on how to enable support access, please see this doc.

    https://wpmudev.com/docs/getting-started/getting-support/#chapter-4

    As soon as you enable access, just drop me a line here so I can check. :slight_smile:

    Cheers,

    Alex :smiley:

  • Alex Stine
    • System Administrator

    Hello Sean

    Hope you are doing well!

    I just checked your WP Smush Pro settings and think you can greatly benefit from these options.

    Resize original images: This will allow you to set a max height and width for your images so you are not serving huge images to your visitors.

    Super-smush my images: Add some extra Smush compression to your images. Will help even more with load time and page scores.

    Convert PNG to JPEG (lossy): In most cases, JPEG is a better image format to use, so this should certainly help with your scores if this is an option you can use.

    Please let me know if this helps and if you have further questions. :slight_smile:

    Cheers,

    Alex :smiley:

  • Sean
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi Alex,

    Thanks for these recommendations.

    This does not answer my initial request though. I did standard compression on the entire media library for this site, and yet my score did not move from 6/100. Also, under recommendations, it still says that many images that I have already compressed have not been compressed (see screenshot).

    Did standard compression work properly, and if so why am I still seeing these recommendations to compress images that are already compressed?

  • Alex Stine
    • System Administrator

    Hello Sean

    Hope you are well today!

    Yes, compression does seem to be working fine. You do have many images that are marked in need of reduction. This means to reduce the image physical size in pixels which should ultimately reduce the file size since the file would be physically smaller. You can also enable the Super-smush feature to reduce your image files to even smaller files and this should up your score drastically by using my two recommendations in this reply.

    Hope this helps in answering your questions. :slight_smile:

    Cheers,

    Alex :smiley:

  • Alex Stine
    • System Administrator

    Hello Sean

    Hope you are well today!

    A colleague and myself have been looking over your issue here and it looks like your theme is causing the trouble. Your theme is using CSS to resize your images on the front-end. Whenever you visit an image directly such as the one below, you can see it’s still full size.

    http://nhncwtttsf-flywheel.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2016/10/Main-AH-logo-Horz-w_gradbox-1024×223.png

    You should try downloading all the images mentioned from the performance test, resizing them to a smaller physical size in pixels using photo editing software such as Photoshop, then re upload the images to your site. If this does not work, we will have to look for an alternate solution with your theme.

    Please let me know how it goes. Cheers,

    Alex :smiley:

  • Sean
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi Alex,

    I don’t see how the CSS could possibly cause the source image to grow in size. Also, looking at just the regular version of the image in the media folder, it still appears to be very large:

    http://www.assistinghands.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2016/10/Main-AH-logo-Horz-w_gradbox.png

    When I look at this image in the media editor – it says FULL: Skipped. Did compression/resizing not run for the full version?

    Best,

    Sean

  • Luís Lopes
    • QA

    Hi Sean ,

    Hope you're doing well today!

    Working here alongside with my teammate Alex.

    I give a look into your website and let me pick the suggestions given by Hummingbird related to the images:

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

    1) In the selection I marked with "1" the suggestions are related to the full-size images. When you upload an image, WordPress crops and resizes every image, creating different versions of the image (thumbnails). By default, Smush Pro only compresses these thumbnails, not the original full-size images.

    You should remove these suggestions, enabling the "Include my original full-size images " option in the Smush settings (network admin panel -> Settings–> WP Smush):

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

    2) In the selection I marked with "2", Hummingbird mentions "Compressing and resizing". Looking for the homepage of your website, this image is being resized via CSS:

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

    So, you are using a thumbnail with 1024x223px for the logo and as you defined the height to be 52px (in the Theme Options ) it is being resized to 239x52px. This is a bad pratice and you should use a thumbnail with the proper size (in this case with 239x52px).

    Looking for your Theme options, I think you may be able to avoid this issue using an image editor (like Photoshop or GIMP) to resize the image to the proper size and then re-uploading it again (as my teammate Alex mentioned above).

    I hope this information has been helpful. If I can help you in this or other questions, please let me know!

    Cheers, Luís

  • Sean
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi Luis,

    I turned on the option to compress full size images and re-ran the compressor for the images, yet the exact same recommendations are showing up.

    I understand that resizing manually is an option, but I’m interested in compression on it’s own. I ran your tool across all 50 sites in the multi-site network and have seen zero change in the score on Hummingbird or on Google page speed insights. I’m also still seeing recommendations claiming 87% savings from compression that I have been seeing since the very beginning. What is going on here?

    Best,

    Sean