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[Smush Pro] Bulk smush or use CDN?

Hi,
The site has over 30,000 images (it’s a large ecommerce site) so my question is this – is it better to smush all the images (which will take a very long time) or to use the wpmu CDN.

I’ve activated the CDN which is serving the images so do I need to smush the images as well?
Thanks

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 12:41:50
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hi Russell

    I hope you’re well today!

    “Smushing” images makes them “lighter” and “smaller” in terms of file size so that helps them load faster (thus helping with site performance) but it’s just a part of solution.

    Smush CDN could also benefit from working with already bulk-smushed images as the images would be lighter so that can prevent bandwidth. However, Smush CDN also adds some other benefits:

    – it serves images using CDN so, as a rule, image is served from the location possibly closest to the visitor (so faster)
    – it can also resize images “on the fly” to match their containers (for example so a 1000×800 pixels image is not loaded into the 800x600pixels space on site) – and that happens on CDN site so doesn’t put additional load on your server
    – it can also serve webp images which is often suggested by PageSpeed Insights/GTMetrix

    Personally, I’d actually use both. If I was about to choose one, I’d rather go for CDN only but if only possible – I’d enable CDN having images also smushed on the site.

    Another reason for this is that if CDN bandwidth is used up or for some unexpected reason CDN temporarily goes down, images would still be served as optimized (at least to some degree) while without smushing them – the “fallback” would be to original not-optimized ones :slight_smile:

    Best regards,
    Adam

  • Russell
    • The Crimson Coder

    That’s great advice thank you.
    My only other question then is regarding the number of images. Is there a way to have the smush process happen in the background because at the moment I have to keep the bulk smush page open while it works through 30,000+ images.

  • Predrag Dubajic
    • Support

    Hi Russell,

    I’m afraid that it’s not possible to do Bulk Smush in the background.
    With CDN being active your site will serve optimized images so it’s an urgent thing to optimize images with Bulk Smush and you can do it over time, since Bulk Smush will pick up from where it left of the last time and you will not need to start optimizing everything again when you run new process.

    Best regards,
    Predrag