WPCompress is a newer Image Optimization service for WordPress websites, and it may give older competitors a run for their money. In this review, we’re going to take a look at features, usability, design, and pricing. We’ll also be comparing to other services we’ve used as an agency, such as ShortPixel and Imagify.

Initial Thoughts

WPCompress offers advanced features packaged up in a well thought out UI. Everybody from beginners to professional agencies/freelancers can leverage this tool to optimize all images on a WordPress site.

The setup process is very quick and simple, you simply create the account, hop on the dashboard, generate an API key, install the plugin on the end-user website, add the API key, and get optimized images. If you’re using live mode (more on that below), the change is instantaneous.

Current AppSumo Deal

Currently (as of April 2021), WPCompress is available as a LTD on AppSumo. In this section, we’ll talk about the pricing and licence offering related to that deal – for standard pricing info, scroll to the bottom of this article.

If you’re not interested in the AppSumo deal, keep reading to hear about how it works, and see our test statistics.

In our opinion this deal is almost too good to be true. For $39.00, you get 250,000 optimization credits per month, and for $199 you get 5,000,000 optimization credits per month (go to the standard pricing to understand the value of an individual credit). License tier three and four come with unlimited see name domains, white labeling add ONS, and monthly client quotas. Essentially, if you're an agency you'll want to pick this up even if you don't initially expect to adopt it – it’s just so cost effective.

Appsumo also has a 60 day refund policy, so I’d recommend at least picking up the cheap license, seeing how it works, and then making a decision.

And yes, you actually get what you pay for:

Two Image Optimization Modes: Local and Live

This plugin offers two optimization modes, Local and Live.

Live optimization takes your images and compresses based on the device and screen size – this is a feature typically only found in enterprise solutions like ImageEngine. This is then paired with WebP conversion, retina device support and lazy loading. According to reports, BunnyCDN is the underlying network provider. If that’s correct, WPCompress leverages a 30Tbps+ network backbone and 53 international edge locations. Bunny is popular and works well; 170,000 sites use it and it’s handling 200,000+ requests per second.

This live optimization is a major selling point for us. Here are a few use cases in regards to the device specific, adaptive images, coupled with WebP support:

Local optimization compresses your media library and image thumbnails as well as generate additional image formats such as Next-Gen WebP. This is more akin to solutions like ShortPixel (standard) or Imagify. Here, you can see the Bulk Optimization screen for Local Images:

In this example, WPCompress minimized the image size by roughly 46% with no visual change.

With Local optimization, you can bulk optimize, as picture above, or optimize individual images. For this use case, the plugin is a lot like Imagify (discussed more below).

The plugin will show how much was saved, the new size of the image, and any that you choose to exclude.

For the live mode, the tool took a 3.2mb sized image (we disabled WordPress’ image scaling), and served it as a 197.46kb JPEG.

Lazy load was also initialized, as the image faded into the page. This was all done with 1 click of the “enable Live Optimization” button.

Agency Specific Features

While this tool is built for everybody, and simple enough for any user to figure out, there are some clear features designed for web development agencies, which makes it stand out from competitors. These include but are not limited to:

• Have a central dashboard to manage all clients using the service. Allocate credits to clients. Control all plugin options from the dashboard.
• Whitelabel or hide the plugin.
• Send whitelabel reports to clients. You can even setup a custom SMTP integration to send from a branded email address.
• Integrate with MainWP if you use that to manage many sites.
• Non-WP Version; integrate with any website via Javascript snippet.
• External URL support, if images are hosted on S3.
• Whitelabel CDN domain by setting up a CNAME record.
• Support is also great from my experience, they responded within hours on a Sunday!

Standard Pricing And Credit Values

The personal plan comes in a $9/mo, professional comes in at $29/mo and agency pro comes in at $99/mo. You can top up credits with 1 time purchases.

For comparison, the AppSumo LTD for the agency plan comes in at $199 as a 1 time purchase, so it’s definitely something to consider.

Here’s how the credits work:

“Optimization Credits are allocated to your main account, credits can be used for both real-time optimization and local image compression as follows:

1 Credit | Live Optimization Request
10 Credits | Locally Compressed Image or Variation
100 Credits | Original Image Backed Up in the Cloud”

Here’s what the dev says a “standard site” would use:

“Although usage varies based on your specific install, our average site uses 100,000 – 250,000 live requests per month.

That means on average:

• 1 Million Live Requests is recommended for up to 5 sites 
• 5 Million Live Requests is recommended for up to 10 sites 
• 10 Million Live Requests is recommended for up to 25 sites 
• 50 Million Live Requests is recommended for up to 125 sites 

You may also set custom quotas as you wish for total control!

Local Image Usage depends on the initial number of images in your media library, rate of new images added and your plugin and theme environment, but we’re very generous with credits!”

Compared To Competitors

We’ve used Imagify and ShortPixel religiously for client projects. Imagify is great for agencies as they offer a $99/mo unlimited plan, and ShortPixel AI offers a similar solution to WPCompress.

ShortPixel shows up on AppSumo every year, but if you comapere the two deals, you’ll notice that WPCompress just offers better value, while doing the same thing. From our tests, it also does it just as good as ShortPixel AI. And this is definitely objective because each platform is very easy to use, but WPCompress is just a bit prettier.

Imagify is a really solid and mature tool, with an Unlimited plan that you pay for annually. Unfortunately (as mentioned in our Facebook Group, this isn’t the case for everybody). We consistently get a ton of connection errors, which makes it difficult to use on client sites, and recommend to others.

Compatibility With Oxygen Builder

We’re an Oxygen Agency, so of course we needed to test it on an Oxygen site. Everything worked perfectly, and it applied the CDN to background images and normal images alike.

Other User Reviews

On all platforms, WordPress.org, their website, and AppSumo, WPCompress has great reviews regarding support, feature growth, and usability.

Negatives

After using this tool for a few days, the only negative that I could find is that I can't exclude images from the CDN. In several use cases, logos in the header of our websites became incredibly blurry, and had to be replaced with SVG versions of them. This isn't game changing, but pretty much every other tool out there has an easy way to exclude images. I might just be missing something, but if this feature doesn't exist yet, it's something that is definitely needed.

Conclusion

This is a powerful image optimization for WordPress that’s giving competitors a run for their money. WPCompress offers a ton of agency features, but skins it in a beautifully designed user interface that makes it easy to understand for beginners and professionals alike. With the current AppSumo deal, picking this up is a no brainer.