VPS Config & Optimization?

Yes the standard plugin will work. Regarding images “not being optimized enough”, check the first question on the FAQ and/or watch the videos on the Installation page.

Thanks for the reply. I did check it. and the link. So basically I must buy EWWW and enable lossy jpg compression?

Not necessarily, but you’re not giving me much information to go on here. Do you have remove metadata checked? Have you properly resized your images? What makes you think the images are not being optimized enough? Are you checking them on pagespeed, or another testing site? What does that site tell you? Can you provide links to some of the images in question?

I did enable the remove metadata now. Im checking them on pingdom, webpagetest, gtmetrix and pagespeed. Some of them still exceed 500kb and some of those are on my homepage, my homepage stands as 5mb in size as is. Also been adviseed by the above testing sites to optimize.

After you do remove metadata, you have to redo all the images with the Force checkbox (the plugin will normally skip anything it’s already touched).

And could you answer my last two questions above? A link to your test results would be most useful, or at least what your website is, so I can run the tests myself.

Sure man
https://www.webpagetest.org/result/150728_KT_H6H/

https://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bmrI9g/https://www.peopleofthesouth.co.za/

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpeopleofthesouth.co.za%2F&tab=desktop

I will rescan now.

The only way to nail webpagetest.org is to use lossy compression, they recommend level 50, you can see their description at the very bottom of the compress images page. Personally, I think that is silly when you can use tools like jpegmini or tinyjpg (which is what the EWWW API uses) to achieve the similar (or better) savings without killing the quality. Level 50 is utter trash in my opinion…

Pagespeed will be satisfied with the default lossless compression and removing metadata.

I don’t see pingdom giving any specific recommendations on images, but once you finish re-optimizing you’ll be down to about 2.8 MB on those. The other thing that jumps out at me is 1.7 MB for 60+ javascript files. I’d see if there’s some fat you can trim there, and then possibly play around with a minification plugin to squeeze those and combine some of them if possible.

Somewhat unrelated, but when I load https://www.peopleofthesouth.co.za/ versus https://peopleofthesouth.co.za/ (with or without the www), I get different pages. Could just be a DNS quirk, or something odd with your webhost (or perhaps it is intentional while you’re working on the site).

Okay. Im about to reoptimize now. What are the most optimum settings you would suggest? Without noticeable differences?

I’ve unticked all the different compression options, and ticked remove metadata, I’ve also ticked to remove originals after optimizing. Will this last one cause any issues/permalinks etc?

“Somewhat unrelated, but when I load https://www.peopleofthesouth.co.za/ versus https://peopleofthesouth.co.za/ (with or without the www), I get different pages. Could just be a DNS quirk, or something odd with your webhost (or perhaps it is intentional while you’re working on the site).”

I see the same page?

The main thing I always recommend is the metadata removal. If you don’t want to pay for optimization, then don’t worry about the lossy options. If you have very many PNG images, I would recommend making sure you have pngout installed, and bump that to level 0, and optipng to level 3. The rest of the options really just affect WHAT your optimizing, not HOW MUCH.

Regarding the differing pages, I suspect it was a DNS propogation issue, or perhaps a caching thing, as I see the same pages now too.

Okay, it keeps telling me “Operation Interrupted”

I’ve had to run it 3 times now. Still this.

Thanks.

And the option of removing the originals? Is this permalink/404/issue safe?

operation interrupted means the connection between you and the web server is being lost (or some other problem happened with the AJAX request).

The remove originals option only applies to converting image, not optimization. If that is what you are doing, no, it is not permalink/404 safe. It will be better in the next release as I’ve just discovered a rather long-standing bug with the guid that WP returns. The glitch only seems to happen when reverting a converted image back to the original. But of course if you’ve told EWWW to delete the originals, that isn’t an option, and you shouldn’t run into the bug (at least I couldn’t get it to happen during conversion in about 100+ attempts).

SO are you saying I should disable it or leave it?

I wouldn’t even use the conversion options until 2.5 is released. At that point, if you have PNG2JPG JPG2PNG or GIF2PNG enabled, then I would enable the option (mostly because I suspect you want to reduce your disk space on a VPS, not increase it by keeping originals laying around).

im not talking about conversion, just the standard compression types..

That’s what I was wondering, so no need to worry about deleting originals. Image optimization is performed “in place”, and the filename never changes.