ShortPixel Adaptive Images is slowing down my website. How can I solve it?

ShortPixel Adaptive Images (SPAI) is a plugin designed to speed up your website by doing two main things: compressing your images and serving them from our CDN.

By definition, this should greatly improve the loading speed because your site will be effectively serving smaller images from a location (probably) closer to your client than your server.

However, on some occasions, you may see or experience some slowness on your website. Here's what you need to know:

  • There's a chance you are just having a configuration issue, or you are experiencing a conflict with another plugin or theme. Please make sure to carefully read the following article to make sure everything is in order: I installed ShortPixel Adaptive Images but it doesn't seem to work
  • You shouldn't test your site on GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights only once. Because of the way ShortPixel AI works, you should run speed tests twice or more times. Drawing conclusions from only one single test will give inaccurate results.
  • If you saw a warning on GTmetrix or PageSpeed Insights, chances are it is not related to ShortPixel. To learn more, please visit About GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights and other website speed testers.
  • Not every metric you see on GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, or others is related to how fast your website is, and because each test changes depending on several variables, it is easy to get confused and think that ShortPixel slowed down the website. To learn more about this, see How ShortPixel can improve the Core Web Vitals - LCP, FID, CLS.
  • If instead you experience a slowdown in the WordPress admin panel, it may be that your hosting provider is preventing the plugin from contacting ShortPixel's servers to check the status of your account. The underlying error is "connection error: cURL error 28: Operation timed out after 10001 milliseconds with 0 out of 0 bytes received". Because of this limitation, the plugin waits 10 seconds twice before timing out, and that's where the delay in the admin area comes from. You should contact your hosting provider to enable the permission for outgoing http connections in your account, which is required by WordPress's "wp_safe_remote_get".
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