Horribly disappointing

Hey @roseclearfield – thank you for taking the time to leave a review for ShortPixel. I understand that your experience with ShortPixel wasn’t a happy one ??

May I ask you whether you tried to contact support for assistance or if you checked our docs?

Usually when something like what you described happens, the solution is quite simple as you can see in these 2 docs:
Picture quality issues
Reoptimize images with different settings

Also please note that you can easily run some free, quick tests on how the image optimization work without installing the ShortPixel plugin on these 2 sites:
ShortPixel
Jpeg Reducer
They both use the same ShortPixel image optimization algorithms.

Have a nice Sunday! ??
Alex

Hi Alex,

As I’ve said, I’ve spent a ton of time adjusting the settings and image size. No matter what I did, my images looked like garbage. The ShortPixel size reduction is so aggressive, even on the best image quality settings, that it’s not hard to see why.

An image compression plugin is one of those things you should be able to set and forget. I don’t have time to check on it constantly or re-optimize lots of images.

Additionally, when you restore your images to original, they should look good. I am left with loads of garbage quality images that I need to re-upload. I’m very upset about this outcome.

Rose

@roseclearfield – I totally agree with you that “An image compression plugin is one of those things you should be able to set and forget.”!
This is how ShortPixel works for most of our over 100K customers.
But WordPress powers millions of websites that come with a stunning number of plugin combinations and sometimes things are a bit tricky and don’t just work out of the box. This is why I invited you to stop wasting time and better contact us to assist you, it will surely go much faster.

Regarding the restored images: from your description this is most likely a caching problem. If you choose to have the images restored, ShortPixel restored them just fine. But if you’re having a caching plugin or a CDN along the way (e.g. Cloudflare) then even if you restored the images they won’t show up unless you flush the cache.

Please stop wasting your time re-uploading images as there is a much faster solution.

I invite you to let me know the URL of your website and also contact me so I can assist you have this fixed quickly.

Kind regards,
Alex

I use W3 Total Cache and have cleared all of the caches. I still have garbage quality images.

Honestly, it took me a long time to figure out that ShortPixel was ruining my image quality. I didn’t realize that the default settings would be so horrible and assumed there was another issue at play. I would have contacted ShortPixel right away if I’d realized what was happening.

As it is now, I’ve already wasted so much time, I don’t want to go back and forth with support. I just want to move on. If you can explain another solution for clearing the cache, feel free. Otherwise, I really don’t have any more time to deal with trial and error.

Rose

Rose,
unless you share with me the URL of your website I cannot really have a look, make a few tests and assist you further ??

Best regards,
Alex

I understand. I’m not looking for any more assistance.

I have used this on many of my website with no problem at all and increasing PageSpeed score from 60 to more than 90.
I see that at your website roseclearfield(dot)com you use Jetpack to serve images from WordPress CDN. I was using Jetpack on one of my client website and had problem with image quality… the only way to fix it was to regenerate thumbnails.

@ishpifuri @roseclearfield
Indeed, the website uses JetPack and that is the culprit ??

This is an image that looks bad
https://i2.wp.com/www.roseclearfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/30-Dessert-Recipes-for-Two.jpg?w=680&ssl=1

And here is the original:
https://www.roseclearfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/30-Dessert-Recipes-for-Two.jpg

Okay…thanks for the unsolicited advice. I switched off the JetPack image optimize settings, and that seems to have fixed the issue for remaining garbage images.

I’m still not planning to use ShortPixel again any time in the near future. The settings are too aggressive, and I can’t waste any time more time playing around with them.