For this entire year, I’ve struggled with the fact that I am slowly running out of space on my host. I have a small plan — only 500 MB — but it’s cheap, and I haven’t had other problems (and I’m super lazy and don’t want to move). The limitations of my host mean that if I want to add more space or another domain, I’m tripling how much I pay for hosting. Now, I’m on a shared server, so I’m not paying the most, but who doesn’t want to keep their bills as low as possible?
I’ve been bouncing around the 400 meg mark for some time, even though I fixed a couple issues that were using excess disk space. I cleared out database trash, deleted a couple subdomains and empty my mailboxes on the server on a weekly basis. It just wasn’t cutting it, however. For some reason, I was up 30 megs in the last month or so for no reason.
In a last ditch effort, I did some Googling. I ran across SWP mush.it, a plugin for WordPress that squishes images by eliminating unnecessary bytes. The process took 30 minutes on Reviews by Cole but significantly less time here because I use fewer images. In the future, every image I upload will be “smushed” by this plugin. I anxiously waited to see how much file space this reduce.
After running WP Smush.it on a single site, I dropped 30 megs in a day. I expect I’ll be well under 400 megs after my control panel updates data. Of course, this benefits my readers because those images take less time to load.
The technology behind WP Smush.it is part of the Yahoo Developer Network, but the folks behind WPMU are now keeping the plugin alive and updated. I can’t wait to see what else they do with WP Smush.it in the future.
The post Smush.It: My New Favorite Plugin appeared first on The Scrolls.