Hey there.
Sorry to hear about your issues.
I asked a tech a WPMUDEV who said that he uses it constantly and it doesn’t effect his page load times either way., so why use it?
This was the ticket:
https://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/so-when-using-wp-smush-pro-on-a-site-and-testing-the-speed
Patrick was referring to how the plugin code affects your site load time when active vs deactive. He wasn’t referring to how optimising your image size can help load times on your site.
This plugin doesn’t optimise your site, it optimizes your images, the ones you use in posts, and in the media library. Smaller images means the site should load quicker.
That said, I had another user report a similar issue. Although I, like Patrick, was unable to recreate the issue of slowing my site down. We are looking into this matter further to ensure there isn’t something we missed.
On DEV you mentioned:
I ran a p3 test And it tells me that Gantry Frameworks is whats really slowing me down but that still doesn’t explain why Smush would actually increase my download speed.
Just out of interest, what happened with that disabled? And then what was the difference (from no Gantry) if you deactivated Smush (no Gantry + no Smush).
Would it be possible for you to please include screenshots showing those stats?
And finally, would you be willing to do a time to first byte test whilst active, and whilst deactivate, and then share the link for both results so I can see the stats:
http://www.webpagetest.org/
If you can, that would be fantastic. It will enable us to look into this matter further.
Have a great weekend.
