WP Compress

The visitor who leaves never shows up in any sales report

It is the quietest loss a website has. Somebody taps your link from a phone, on middling coverage, and the page takes five seconds to appear. That visitor does not show up in your abandoned cart reports, because they never got as far as seeing the product. They simply go back and open the next result.

Almost all that weight sits in two places: the images and the distance. The images, because they get uploaded exactly as they came out of the camera. The distance, because your server may be nine thousand kilometres from whoever is reading you.

WP Compress works on both fronts at once, and it does it from its own servers: which is why here the licence is not only updates, it is the service doing the work.

What the official WP Compress licence covers

The optimisation service and the delivery network, which is what processes and serves your files, plus the maker's updates and their support. The GPLClub team does the activation on your domain.

What it does

• Optimises images in real time, adapting them to the device and generating modern formats such as WebP, with support for high density screens.
• Serves content from a global network, so files travel from the server nearest the visitor rather than crossing the planet.
• Lazy loading of images and video, so the first screen does not drag along whatever is further down.
• Gives granular control to whoever wants to tune it, with tools designed for people managing several sites.

When it pays

If you sell or live off visits. Speed here is not a vanity metric: it is the step before any conversion, and it gets paid back on every order that does arrive.

If your audience is far from your server. That is where the delivery network changes matters most, and where no local optimisation reaches.

If your site is small and local, a well-configured cache may be enough: members have WP Rocket in the catalogue for that part.

It is worth understanding the difference with the other piece on this ground: a compression tool works on your images, and this one also delivers them. If you only want the first, look at the Imagify licence.

About licensing and the GPL

The plugin's code is distributed under the GPL licence and its use is free. The optimisation service and the delivery network are another matter: they are contracted with the maker and without them the plugin has nothing to do. They are not the same thing, and buying one is not buying the other.