I am interested in the image optim plugin to decrease loading time of my blog www.statsandr.com. However, I see in my Netlify settings (see attachment) that the images are already compressed.
Therefore, what does the plugin do in addition to my current settings?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Glad you asked! Although we can’t speak for the plugin, the author or their intentions, this is something which has cropped up before so I’d be happy to dive in a bit.
Netlify’s optimisation rewrites the image URL’s HTML to Cloudfront with a new URL. So, if you link to images directly, they’re not optimised. There may be CORS implications of this, too. Additionally, we add specific caching headers which aren’t overridable.
The plugin, on the other hand, will not succumb to any of the aforementioned points. Instead, however, images are optimised each time you build a site (at the time of writing). This could have notable impact on your build minutes and it has the potential to become costly (depending on your site/size/asset count, of course).
One big factor, in personal opinion, is that Netlify’s optimisation is part of our core product. It’s spares you ‘another dependency’ which we, Netlify, are not in control of. If you find a bug in a plugin, it’s up to the author and supporters to resolve.
Hopefully this candid discussion can help you to assess what’s important to you and evaluate how you want to optimise your assets!
Thanks for your answer!
