I’ve been doing image optimization for over fourteen years, but it never gets old when someone says “Thank you!” Such was the case as I was chatting with Scott over at Barrel Roll. He shared how Easy IO was helping their team with lots of client sites, and I asked them to share a bit more. Here’s a peak inside how EWWW IO has helped Barrel Roll, and we’d love to be there for you too!
At Barrel Roll, we’ve built, maintained, and optimized hundreds of websites, and one thing always rings true: images are often a performance bottleneck. We want client sites that look amazing and load quickly. That’s why we rely on EWWW Image Optimizer to help us and our clients easily improve their workflows and optimize load times.
We set a high bar for WordPress website optimization.
Clients love uploading heavy hero banners, full-width photos, high-res assets, etc. We enjoy fancy hero sections as much as the next person, as they make sites memorable, but they also slow things down.
It’s a problem we often find when reviewing new websites (along with poor servers, unoptimized themes, and too many plugins). Our performance optimization process starts with a full assessment of a site’s current performance. We test how content loads and identify issues, and record those results as a baseline, retesting after each major improvement to track real progress.
A fast-loading website is the backbone of a great user experience. And since we rely on accurate reporting to show clients their measurable improvements, we needed a solution that provided straightforward data in addition to:
- Delivering quality visuals without sacrificing speed
- Scaling easily as sites grew
- Fitting seamlessly into WordPress without complicated setup
Manual optimization was a time sink, and relying on clients to remember to resize images was… optimistic. We needed something that would automatically rein in huge uploads and scale across client sites without requiring hours of developer attention.
We also needed to preserve image quality while boosting site speed, and the solution had to integrate well with our existing tools.
We were impressed with EWWW’s results.
When we compared EWWW to the competition back in 2017 (with and without its API credits enabled), the results were exceptional: we saw about a ~78.31% average file-size reduction in controlled tests. And while some plugins shaved off slightly more size, they did so at the cost of visible image quality loss. EWWW gave us a “sweet spot” of excellent size reduction with minimal quality compromise.
A few of the real-world results we’ve recorded for clients using EWWW include:
- Using image optimization to reduce average page load times by ~41.49%, from around 3.05 seconds to 1.79 seconds.
- Reducing an image-heavy homepage load time by around 35.75%, from 2.62 seconds to 1.68.
- A load time reduction of about 41.89%, from 2.25 seconds to 1.3 seconds, for a mental health professional’s website
- Achieving substantial storage savings across multiple high-volume sites, including:
- 1.59 GB reduced on a site with high-resolution portfolio images
- 11.07 GB reduced on an image-heavy travel agency website
- 1.58 GB reduced for a client with multiple high-res hero sections
- 3.3 GB reduced on an education-focused platform
- 3.94 GB reduced on an image-heavy school website
And it’s really easy to use. We deploy the plugin, configure a few settings, hit Bulk Optimize, and watch thousands of images shrink without losing clarity. That’s it! What used to take hours (or even days) across large sites now takes a click.
It’s a tool we’ve relied on for a long, long time.
EWWW Image Optimizer became part of our process so long ago that we honestly don’t remember the moment we first installed it. It’s simply been the go-to solution for around a decade, if not longer.
The plugin has remained in our toolset because it reliably solves every pain point we run into, plus it continues to evolve with WordPress itself.
And we don’t plan on switching any time soon.
Local processing, no file-size limits, powerful default settings, and reliable developer support are what sealed the deal for us. Other plugins can handle parts of optimization well, but none of the ones we’ve tested have delivered the full package the way EWWW IO does.
We can optimize entire media libraries at scale, offer clients automatic optimization without any extra work on their part, launch faster and leaner websites, and maintain long-term performance with little manual effort.
For anyone managing a website – whether you’re an agency, a small business, or a content creator – EWWW IO offers:
- Best-in-class image optimization
- A hard-to-beat level of simplicity
- Excellent documentation and reporting
- A straightforward, scalable cost structure
- Best-in-class support
While plenty of image optimization plugins exist, we’ll happily continue to recommend EWWW Image Optimizer because it hits the perfect balance between being powerful enough for developers, simple enough for everyday users, and consistently reliable.
