WP Smush Pro

Porn is visual art. With the exception of erotic literature, all porn is about seeing some titties and showing some titties. And, only nerds read, so who cares about writing. Most of your work as a porn webmaster is going to include visual media and that means pictures. Even porn tubes are all about the images, what with thumbnails and previews. Pictures are inevitable. If you’ve got any kind of content on your site, you’re going to be handling tons of pictures and that, of course, means storage and bandwidth. For every single page your users load, that’s a ton of visual media being piped through Ethernet ports and across cables and you get charged for every single bit.

That’s why you need to optimize your shit. You have to compress your photos and make sure to only send your users what they need. The bottom line here is that you don’t want to waste any of your bandwidth. The first step to running images on your site is to upload and embed them where appropriate. If you don’t want to go broke, the second step is to compress them appropriately. You don’t need to run full resolution embeds of all of your photos, across your site. Unless someone straight-up requests the full resolution image, you want to give them a smaller preview, each time. This rule applies tenfold on phones, as they have smaller screens. The third step to proper photo management is to get a plugin that does it all for you, on several layers, with additional tools to help you perfect your optimization process. That’s where Smush Pro comes in.

The Compression Method

Before we talk about multi-version photo compression, we have to take a look at Smush Pro’s standard compression method for photos, because it is damn impressive. They have a little demo on their landing page, under the WPMuDev site. They let you move a slider across a photo of some salad, to show you a before and after of the exact same photograph. I dare you to tell me the difference between the first and second photo. They’re damn identical. However, the compressed result is only a third of the size of the original. That’s some damn impressive compression.

It’s not that these guys have their own state of the art compression algorithm. I mean, they have their own approach, but for the most part, the appeal isn’t in the actual type of compression. It’s more about taking the effort to compress in the first place, without losing out on important details. An average photograph, especially one of naked titties, is unnecessarily huge because of how pictures are stored. Whether the files come straight from the camera, or they’ve been processed for web viewing, original photography files are bulky. They don’t shave down on redundant patterns in the photos, which is why these files are usually painfully huge.

Well, Smush Pro has the common sense to compress wherever possible, while keeping the original safely in storage, in case someone wants to download the uncompressed file. But, for any kind of preview purpose, you’ll want Smush’s compressed version instead. A human being literally can’t tell the difference. There’s no way they could possibly notice that the photos were compressed down to a third of their size. That’s an amazing ratio that you cannot refuse.

Tools for Automation

This type of compression is already common on WordPress and as Smush Pro is a WordPress plugin, you might feel it’s a bit redundant. Hear me out; it’s not that simple. Smush comes with slightly better compression than the built-in features and operates across your entire website. Plus, it comes with features that let you analyze the compression as well as the storage space you’ve saved, through custom menus that analyze your web media. You get a photo analysis dashboard that helps you keep track of how much work your compression is actually doing.

These tools might be optional, but they’re damn impressive. They seem a bit redundant while your site is in its early stages, but once you start to import content en masse, you can forget about keeping track of file sizes manually. Smush Pro comes in with a site-wide scan of your content and quick and easy to use tools to programmatically sweep through all photos and compress them where appropriate.

Multi-Version Compression

This is yet another feature that is already industry standard, but Smush Pro brings it to you with a more streamlined interface and the highest quality compression algorithms. The short and skimmy of it is: You have multiple versions of the same image available for different screen sizes and frames. So, if you’ve got video thumbnails of an unusually large quality, but you’re displaying them in tiny squares across a large area, you might as well have these files ready in small super-compressed sizes, for near-instant page load times.

Smush Pro does all of this for you. It’s an entire CDN built into a simple WordPress plugin with all the professional-grade tools you need to stay on top of operations, without having to do manual work. Most of their design is built around the idea of single-click solutions. Their system analyzes your site’s image files at lightning speeds and you get a simple, one-click solution to optimizing, site-wide. It’s like one of those phone apps that optimizes your mobile storage in a single click, without you having to think about what files it’s deleting or whatever. Single-click optimization solutions are the best way to handle tons of media files. You simply do not have the time to work on your images on a case by case basis. You need a plug-in that you can trust.

Several Payment Tiers

The cheapest version of Smush Pro comes with an infinite amount of processed images on one website, for only $5 a month, though it’s billed annually. You can get it monthly for $6, though, so it’s not like they’re forcing your hand. This is the simplest form of Smush Pro and it does indeed come with everything you need to optimize your site’s image files. It’s a no-compromise, affordable solution.

Next up, we’ve got the $7.50 a month tier, with some amazing added features. There’s Hummingbird Pro that nets you some amazing performance reports, a caching suite, CDN functionality, asset optimization and more. This is the package you have to spring for if you want site-wide automated content delivery with all the modern bells and whistles. It’s important to note that even though they specialize in image file compression, the CDN services cover every type of file and content delivery.

They also analyze all of your traffic for bottlenecks and give you direct suggestions on how to improve your bandwidth utilization. This tier also comes with an uptime monitor, which is constantly analyzing your site’s performance. It’s customizable and will immediately inform you if your site starts to underperform.

The WPMU Tier

You can spring for the gigantic WPMU DEV Membership for only $15.83 a month, billed yearly. This tier comes with an insane amount of bonuses that I think are a great deal. You get 11 Pro plugins, reaching far beyond just image compression and bandwidth optimization. This tier basically has nothing to do with Smush Pro specifically – it’s a package deal containing a bunch of site optimization tools that more or less cover the spread of all WordPress plugins you might ever need to pay for. There’s a bunch of stuff in there that covers SEO, white label, users, roles, backups and security. It’s an amazing package deal, but I’d advise that you check the actual plugins one by one before you commit to the whole package deal. You might not need them all.

With the cheapest tier of Smush Pro, you, of course, get ticket support. If you want more personalized support, you get 24/7 Live Chat with the $7.50 tier. However, the complete package deal comes with an all-around WordPress support, again, 24/7 over chat, but keep in mind that this means you can ask them damn near anything you want and they have to help you. For any WordPress related bugs, problems or improvements, you can rely on their support.

Smush Pro is clearly one of those amazing WordPress plugins made by up and coming developers in the industry who are trying to break through to the mainstream by quality alone. Right now, their plugins are pretty damn cheap and I wholeheartedly recommend that you consider adding them to your website.