taynkbot

Hmm, could be? I’ve had to install WP a few times on my site, and each time it installs with Akismet, Jetpack, MOJO Marketplace, OptinMonster, and Hello Dolly. So it definitely could be my host that included those first four, in which case I apologize, and it is totally my bad.

Thank you again for the help! You’re a lifesaver!

Pioneer Web Design, that did it! I turned off “Enable Site Accelerator” from within Jetpack / Settings, reloaded, and it works! Thank you so much! I’m not sure why I didn’t see that change when I moved my entire plugins folder in my file manager to a place I didn’t think it’d be reached; I guess that doesn’t work the same as deactivating.

I’ll just add that clearly I don’t have WordPress expertise, but neither am I entirely incompetent. I searched quite extensively before posting here, and did a fair amount of troubleshooting. I shouldn’t need to read how WP works front to back in order to find out that Jetpack is to blame. And in fact, I searched through every single lesson in WordPress_Lessons searching for Jetpack and or accel just now, and got nothing, except “You may want to install plugins such as Jetpack by WordPress.com to supercharge your website.”
Jetpack is certainly separate from WP, but it came preinstalled and I activated it without a thought. I know you urge people to read up on WP, but I’m betting that a lot of us don’t read nearly as much as we should and that should be a given by now. And even if I knew everything about WP by reading the lessons, I wouldn’t really have a clue about Jetpack, and I’m betting I’d still be here asking this same question.
If I could offer a suggestion that would have helped me, it’d be to not have Jetpack come preinstalled. If I had to install it myself, I would have taken the time to understand what it actually did; but when it comes preinstalled I get the notion that it’s just an all-around good plugin to have. I wouldn’t have suspected WP had I known what Jetpack actually can do, and I would have known that had I found Jetpack by searching for what it can offer rather than it being served to me from the start.

Hopefully others will be able to find this post before they go down the rabbit hole of throwing around php and pulling their hair out!

Anyway, thank you so much again! And I’m actually currently working to integrate Lightroom with some kind of HTML gallery, so I appreciate your bonus suggestion!

Cheers!

I’m allowing WordPress to resize them, starting with images whose long side is 1920, and with an average image size of around 1MB.
Still, as I mentioned, that was one of the things I first suspected. I tracked down those WordPress-resized versions of my images within my file manager, and they look as good as I could ask for.

You can try it for yourself though. Just head over to my test page, and right click to save the water droplet picture to your hdd. The image you’ll get will be a WP resized image, yet if you open it up in an image viewer it will appear as it should. Compare it to the source image on my live site, though, and you can particularly see the lack of clarity and some bad artifacting around the droplets themselves, but even the image as a whole is shoddy and is clearly being compressed.

So it’s not the fault of resizing. Unless there’s another location other than wp-content/uploads where my images are being resized and compressed a second time, and WP uses those severely compressed images on the live site, but when you right click to save the image, it pulls from the higher quality version. That seems absolutely unlikely, though, and would be a ridiculous thing to have built in! It’s the opposite of anti-theft! Plus I’d expect WP to be more forward about that kind of thing. And like I said, I tried deactivating all plugins, so whatever is going on is with WP, or possibly the few themes I tried (Astra, 2019, 2017).

Every indication points to some real-time kind of compression. The file size is exactly the same whether I right click the image and save it, or whether I go to my file manager and download that version directly. Some compression seems to be applied as the site loads.

The only time my images look bad is when WP loads them on the live site; the resized versions look just fine; in the customizer and Elementor, every size version of an image appears as it should; right clicking an image from the live site manages to pull the correct, unaltered image from the source.

What kind of necromancy is this!? Although I’m probably not allowed to libel necromancers, oops!

Here’s a test I don’t know how to perform, but I believe it should be possible. Is there a way to use Chrome Inspector or View Source Page (or something else) to see the properties of the images being displayed on a web page, such as their file size? If so, I would expect to see a smaller file size here than in the source images. This would certainly indicate that there’s some post compression happening right after my images are pulled from the DB, and before they are loaded on my site.