Andy

Hi @pascal77 to follow up here… we’ve done a fair bit of research around this and have found meta keywords can actually have an adverse affect on SEO and can become a liability. Based on our research we’ve decided we will not be adding meta keywords back into SmartCrawl. For ref:

“Here’s the other problem – Meta keywords has been used as a negative ranking signal, and probably still is to some degree. In other words, you might not gain much or anything from using it, but if you spam it, you could get devalued. My gut feeling is that the negative signal is much, much stronger than the positive one, and even Google may still use it as a negative signal. I’m certain that Yahoo/Bing has used it as a negative signal (not sure if they still do).”

https://moz.com/community/q/are-meta-keywords-coming-back#reply_136215

Can you describe your specific use case that requires meta keywords for your internal search engine?

Thanks!
Andy

@thestreeter thanks for logging this. This is definitely not practical and we haven’t heard any reports of this before. I’ll ping our lead developer and get him to take a look. Can you provide more information RE

The WordPress version you’re running
The SmartCrawl version
Any other plugins installed (and their versions)
A link to the affected page
Who you are hosted with (this could be a factor)

If you can provide the info above it’ll help our dev to figure out the issue ??

Thanks!
Andy

@antoniocarloslima just to chime in here (I work at WPMU DEV) – have you checked that your server has a mail server installed to send those emails? It sounds like your WordPress installation isn’t sending emails because it isn’t set up to.

Follow this tutorial and see if you can debug this a bit further: https://kinsta.com/knowledgebase/wordpress-not-sending-emails/ and if it’s not, you could install an SMTP plugin to send those emails for you – or contact your host to help you out.

Hope this helps!
Andy

Hey @phalancs the team are in discussions about how we can improve this and optimise the code to only output exactly what’s needed. Watch this space as there should improvements coming out soon ?? thanks for your patience!

Andy

Hi @dan14

Yes, you most absolutely can :). You can exclude by post type, page/post ID or right down to the image using CSS classes and IDs. You’ll find all of these settings on the Lazy Load tab within the Smush Settings area.

I will ping our lead developer for some input on the mobile-only lazy loading… I don’t believe it’s possible via the UI at the moment but it may be workable with a bit of code.

Expect a reply from Anton shortly :).

Cheers,
Andy

Hi Niseadel,

Very sorry to hear you’ve run into an issue here! Alas, there is a solution to easily restore your images and re-smush your images with the EXIF option disabled.

You can restore your images by installing the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin, regenerating your affected thumbnails and then returning to Smush to re-compress them as per your new settings.

We find that most (not all) users don’t need EXIF data so we have it on by default to save as much filesize as possible. I do apologise for any grief this has caused you and hope you can continue using the plugin ??

Any further help we can be, please get in touch, and if after you’ve fixed things up feel that the plugin is better than a 1 star review it would be great to be re-reviewed!

Cheers,
Andy

Sorry, missed the bit about cropping. When you set up custom thumbnail/image sizes in WP, you can tell it how to crop the photo. In general though, because you know exactly where you’re doing to use the image, you’ll know the size of it. Create your images to match the ratio/size and you’ll be fine.

Side note: If you have a 728px square image and you upload an image double that size, WP will automatically output the required code to support retina screens which will give crisper images to higher resolution screens. Nice little feature ??

>Let’s say my site has the following three thumbnails defined:

Those are the default image sizes you can customise with a standard WordPress install. Mostly, you should keep those free for just your pages/post content – not the bits outside of this (like your footer, profile photos etc).

For those more specific image sizes I would create separate specific image sizes for those use cases. That way, you can have standard 100, 300 and 750px image sizes to use on your page content, but maybe a 125px footer image, a 40x40px logo in the heading and a 728px size for the profile images. Yes, WordPress will then generate and store all of those image sizes when you upload an image, but it means then you are serving the right size for the user on the front end.

It’s a bit of a wormhole topic, ha! In the end, there’s no real right and wrong way – this is just the way WP intends developers to use the thumbnail system.

Cheers!
Andy

@cag8f yup, exactly that :).

In a general sense, here’s the problem with using ‘full’ size images in your theme frontend.

Ouputting fullsize: One of your staff log in and they accidentally upload a 4000x4000px image as their profile image. Because your theme is set to display the ‘full’ size image, it will output a 4000x4000px image to a 728px container. That means visitors to your site will end up loading up this huge image for no reason.

Creating and serving a specific thumbnail size: Even if your staff upload a 4000x4000px image, it doesn’t matter. WordPress will create the 728px size it needs and serve that on the frontend. Visitors only ever load up the size of image needed for the size it’s displayed at.

Hope this helps ??

>>It would be nice to have the option to optimize the original size images. But, I guess that’s why you have the premium version

Precisely. We give pretty much everything most people need in the free version, and the pro version offers power user features. The thumbnail approach is generally a good idea as it ensures you’re always serving images at the right size (which Google recommends). You have a bit of a unique case, but it sounds like you managed to get around it.

Cool tattoos too!

Cheers,
Andy

Hey @cag8f,

I’ve just taken a look at how you are outputting your images on your website and it appears you are using the full size (original upload) on the frontend. Therefore, Smush won’t touch these images. Even though this is a limitation of the free version, there’s an easy work around…

If you instead get WordPress to create a thumbnail at this size (728 x 728 px) and use this size on the frontend, smush will include and optimize the images.

This little article covers how to do this quite well: https://soliloquywp.com/beginners-guide-to-add-custom-image-sizes-in-wordpress/.

In general we don’t recommend compressing your original images unless you have a unique use case that requires it. By not touching your original full size images, you always keep a non-optimized version available incase something goes wrong. Hope this helps you!

Cheers,
Andy

Hey Will,

Just to add on from Dimitris response… The first version of WebP conversion will be converted and hosted on our WPMU DEV CDNs only, I don’t believe S3 will be supported. With that said however, I am putting it into the pipeline to support S3 and non-CDN hosted webp conversion.

Understand that’s not ideal for your particular use case to begin with but I hope it won’t be long till we support it ??

Cheers,
Andy

I’ve just confirmed a few finer details with the team.

1. Yes, although WebP will be a Pro only feature served from our CDN. I haven’t confirmed yet whether a free version of this will be available.
2. Yes, it will handle the display of the WebP images.
3. Yes, it will gracefully fallback to a Jpeg or PNG version.

Hope this helps! Keen to hear your feedback ??
Andy

Hi Will,

Yes, WebP will be available in Smush pretty soon. Can’t give a solid ETA but it won’t be too much of a wait :). Keep an eye out!

Cheers,
Andy

@alexlii I had this issue this morning, make sure you leave the tab open until the process completes. For me, it sits at 100% for quite a long time before it finishes the data update – and then you’ll be able to view the lockouts module.

Hope this helps!
Andy