It is going soooo slow.

Hello Sean,

Why does the page need to be kept open? Does that mean I can’t open another tab and do something else in the meantime?

Yes, you can open another tab and do something else – just don’t close page where Smush is working. It has to be open because it does not work in “background”.

The plugin sometimes shows a server 500 posting to API error: No file content sent, but when I refresh the page it seems to pick up where it left off, if I click ‘Smush Now’.

Usually 500 server error means there is problem with memory limits – please try increasing them https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/increase-memory-limit/
Let me know if this will help.

kind regards,
Kasia

Hi Kasia,

Thank you for getting back to me.

Smushit finally finished. At least after a day or 2 of very slow activity, it all of a sudden went much quicker. It appears it might have been some sort of a server issue, only I’m not entirely sure what. Maybe memory, or the shared server was having other issues my host didn’t want to tell me, or it was just very busy for a time. Either way, my site is running, but Smushit doesn’t seem to have made much difference to the speed, even with W3TC turned on. All our images were already very small.

I have set higher all the memory limits that I am able to, but maybe my host is overriding that somehow. Oh the joys of shared hosting. Maybe it is time for dedicated.

With all that said, I think I have more optimising work to do, such as render blocking javascript, among other things. I could run off to another host, or switch to VPS cloud dedicated, but if a site is poorly optimised, it will still run slow on any server, if I’m not mistaken.

Hello, you are running on a shared hosting or a VPS?
I recommend to use Smush on a vps not a shared hosting.
Wp-smush it is running smoothly on my website: https://magentoexplorer.com/ and it helps optimize lots of images.

Hi Sean,

Apologies for the delay here.

It’s quite possible that there was some connection issue or that our servers were overwhelmed with requests, however the second one shouldn’t last long and usually it picks up after couple of hours.

You see, how the smush works is that it sends your images to our servers where the optimization is performed, after it’s done it sends images back to your server and overwrite your original unsmushed images.

So, if there’s a connection issue on one side the process will take longer.

Cheers,
Predrag

Hi Predrag,

Thank you for getting back to me.

Smush finally finished, after a few days, but there has been no noticeable change in the load speed of my site, even with W3TC.

As it turns out, my host is for some strange reason limiting access to the admin-ajax.php file. This I believe is one of the most basic files for wordpress to function properly. So I have decided to move hosts in the coming weeks, and to sign up for VPS dedicated. I have a sneaky suspicion this will solve a lot of the issues I’ve been having.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Sean.

Hi Sean,

If you’re site is not image heavy optimizing them will not have much impact on your loading speed, however it will still improve results of your site in Google Page Insight.

Loading speed can be affected by many factors, starting from your server response time, number of plugins installed, theme used, PHP version on your server, browser and server caching, GZIP compression, minification and so on.

Those are some of the things you can check if switching to VPS doesn’t have much impact on your site performance.

Cheers,
Predrag