New to the community? Start here

[Smush Pro] Best practices: Bulk Smush, CDN, or both?

The settings seem to suggest either Bulk Smush or CDN loading, not both. (On the CDN settings page, “Automatically compress and resize your images with bulk Smush, or upload them to the WPMU DEV’s blazing-fast CDN…” ) Is it indeed one vs. the other, or is it OK to do Bulk Smush first, then enable CDN?

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 2:32:45
More Smush Pro discussions
Smush Pro
  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Joe

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your question!

    I would actually go for both. The “bulk smushing” physically affects images on your site – it optimizes and/or resizes them which results in some significant benefits:

    – if CDN is disabled, images are still optimized (may not be resized “on the fly” and are not converted to new image formats but that’s still way better than unoptimized images)
    -if CDN is disabled less bandwidth is used and images load faster
    – if CDN is enabled – that’s, again, less bandwidth used
    – if CDN is enabled – that provides a “fallback” in case CDN was down or the bandwidth was entirely used and Smush would have to “revert” to local images; in such case images that would be served would still be optimized

    The CDN itself does optimize images, convert them to webp and resize so that’s great and it can work on it’s own, of course but I would go for a “combination” of both anyway – mostly to preserver bandwidth a bit and to be sure that if for any reason images stops being served from CDN temporarily, they are still optimized.

    Additionally, there might be certain cases where images are not served from CDN anyway, even though it’s enabled – for example backgrounds added via CSS (that is not inline CSS from “style=” attribute of HTML tag) or if there’s some sort of conflict or uncommon and unsupported HTML markup from the theme. In such cases – if bulk-smushed, images would still be optimized to some degree.

    Best regards,
    Adam