10,001 and after:<\/strong> $0.002 per image<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nIt doesn’t matter how big the images are, just how many you compress. So if you compress 1000 images it will cost you $5 and 10,000 images will cost you $20.<\/p>\n
There is also a minimum charge of $1 a month, but if you don’t use any credits in a given month you won’t be charge. If you use less than 200 credits in a month, your $1 minimum monthly payment will give you credit into the following month.<\/p>\n
Features<\/h4>\n EWWW\u00a0lets you compress images up to 16MB each, though the terms of service ask that you\u00a0“please contact us if you think this is unrealistic.”<\/p>\n
While the plugin can run on your own server, for the purposes of this test I used the premium cloud server option and allowed EWWW’s\u00a0servers to do all the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n
Like Kraken and WP Smush Pro, EWWW\u00a0can automatically optimize images as you upload them to your site. It can also optimize existing images\u00a0and convert images automatically to the file format that will produce the smallest image size (though this last feature comes with a big “warning” stamp). You can also optionally apply lossy reductions for PNG and JPG images.<\/p>\n
By default, the EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud plugin uses lossless optimization techniques, so your image quality will be exactly the same before and after optimization.<\/p>\n
Ease of Use<\/h4>\n After reading\u00a0through EWWW’s imposing terms of service on the website’s pricing page, I signed up for a premium account and downloaded the\u00a0EWWW Image Optimizer Cloud plugin.<\/p>\n
The plugin added two new menu items to the Media section in the WordPress sidebar: Bulk Optimize and Unoptimized Images. It wasn’t immediately clear how I should use the plugin so I watched the installation video at WordPress.org to work out what to do. I realized\u00a0a third menu item for additional settings had been\u00a0added to the Settings section in the sidebar. I should point out here that the installation video goes for 16 minutes and I didn’t make it through to the end.<\/p>\n
I received an email from EWWW with my API key and added this to the plugin (I found it odd that you can’t access your API key when you login to your account on the EWWW website, you can only access your personal and billing details), checked the options for JGP and PNG cloud optimization, and also double checked\u00a0that I was using lossless optimization so the results were comparable to the testing I did for WP Smush Pro and Kraken.<\/p>\n
The first time I tried to upload the Theme Unit Test Data the plugin timed out, so I tried again, and then a third time. Since I was using Cloudways, I was able to quickly increase my maximum upload limit to 32MB (it was originally 10MB). It still didn’t help. I then did a database reset so my install was clean and reinstalled EWWW before uploading the Theme Unit Test Data again, and that seemed to do the trick. Still, I wasted about 30 minutes trying to work things out.<\/p>\n
I didn’t have any problems at all uploading the Unsplash images.<\/p>\n
Compression<\/h4>\n While the compression for the Unsplash images was comparable to Kraken, the compression for the Theme Unit Test Data was woeful \u2013 just 3% and not really worth the time and effort.<\/p>\n
And the Winner is… WP Smush Pro<\/h3>\n The results speak for themselves: WP Smush Pro was the clear winner both in terms of the level of compression and the time it took to compress images.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
WP Smush Pro is the best premium image compression plugin for WordPress.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\nWP Smush Pro was easy to set up and handled the Theme Unit Test Data images with ease. The plugin didn’t miss a beat\u00a0compressing\u00a0large Unsplash images I threw at it.<\/p>\n
By\u00a0contrast, EWWW was fiddly and time consuming to set up and caused my site to timeout. Kraken’s savings were good, but it was\u00a0really slow at\u00a0compressing the large images.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n
While WP Smush (formerly WP Smush.it) has been a popular free option for many years, WP Smush Pro is a relative newcomer to the premium image compression market. For diehard fans of Kraken and EWWW, WP Smush Pro still has a lot of convincing to do, though I hope\u00a0the results of this image comparison testing will\u00a0prove it’s a serious contender backed by a fantastic team of developers who are constantly working to improve it.<\/p>\n
And just to throw a few numbers at you, here are the stats for WP Smush Pro over the past month (up until May 17):\u00a062.8\u00a0million\u00a0images smushed on\u00a0124,136 different WordPress sites with an average saving of 9%.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We developed Smush Pro to meet the needs of serious smushers. But how does Smush Pro stack up against its competition? We decided to find out and pitted Smush Pro against its two biggest premium rivals, Kraken and EWWW. The results were somewhat surprising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164650,"featured_media":141149,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4161],"tags":[10096,10128],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-141076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wpmudev","tag-image-compression","tag-smush"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164650"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141076"}],"version-history":[{"count":39,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219609,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141076\/revisions\/219609"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141076"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=141076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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