On January 12 I received what seemed like a routine email. WordPress reminded me about my pending plan* renewal. I ignore most such emails, trusting that the payment details on file will handle the renewal. But this year I knew I needed to update my payment information, so I clicked through and looked after it right away.

The Start of My Dilemma

The next morning, I a non-routine email arrived. WordPress again, this time a notification that my site storage was running low. What?!? From what I remembered, I was using ~ 80 / 200 GB. I fired up WordPress and discovered my storage limit had been reset to just over the amount of storage used. Apparently updating my payment details triggered a reduction in my storage limit? Hmmm…

A little digging and I learned that I missed a significant change to the terms and conditions of the WordPress business plan. More than a year ago, the storage included with the business plan dropped from 200 GB to 50 GB. Because my plan renews every two years, I missed that. Fess up – how many times do you click through and read everything when you receive a “terms and conditions changing” email notification?

Immediate Ideas/Thoughts

I figured the solution would be easy. Just pay for additional storage! But at C$68.54 (US$50) per month, that was going to add up fast! More than C$800/year for 50 GB of storage seemed ridiculous, even in this age of data centre-driven price increases for storage and processing.

Another possible “solution”? Stop adding files to my media library and instead link to media hosted on Flickr, where I have unlimited storage with a much lower annual fee. But further investigation revealed the possibility that WordPress would stop updating plug-ins, features and maybe even security. Not a chance I wanted to take.

That left me scrambling to figure out some kind of image optimization solution. With more than 12,000 images in my WordPress media library, I had to do more than wish that years ago I’d asked fellow Photo Blogging Challenge participant cmiked why he links to images on Flickr rather than hosting them on his blog site (and followed suit). I needed a solution that would batch process all of my media library images.

On top of everything else, I was up against a a time crunch because we were leaving in less than 2 weeks for a month-long trip. I briefly thought about leaving this issue to deal with when we returned. But I also knew there’d be a lot of catch up after a month away. And what if I came back sick? Plus personal tax returns would be due soon. So I really didn’t want to leave this problem to be solved in March.

Research Phase

Here are some of the questions I asked during my research phase, along with the answers I came up with through a combination of Google searches and interacting with an AI model:

• How can I reduce the size of my WordPress media library? Answer = image optimzation.
• What is image optimization? Answer = a process that reduces image file sizes while maintaining sufficient quality.
• What are the most important factors to consider when it comes to image optimization for WordPress? Answer = selecting the file format (jpg, WebP or AVIF) and which compression algorithm to use (lossy, glossy or lossless).
• I learned that other considerations include whether you want your optimization tool to use AI to create your image filenames and alt text and whether you want your images served locally or via CDN (a content delivery network , which stores copies of images on serves around the world to improve image loading speeds)
• What are some cost effective services and plug-ins I can use to optimize my WordPress media library? Answer = ShortPixel, IMsanity, Smush and EWWW IO.

Decision

After doing fairly extensive reading, taking notes, signing up for email updates from more than one of the above listed services and thinking about the almost overwhelming options, I came up with the following plan:

• Open an account with ShortPixel and buy a block of credits (I’d read that each image can have 10 or more files that need to be optimized, so I bought a HUGE block of credits);
• Install the ShortPixel plug-in on WordPress;
• Back up my WordPress site;
• Run the ShortPixel plug-in on my WordPress library using Lossy optimization, WebP format and no CDN;
• Look for the ShortPixel created backup and store a copy locally, in case I hated the outcome and wanted to restore my original image files and try another approach.

Implementation

My first issue arose when I tried to install the ShortPixel plug-in. Because WordPress updated my storage limit to align with the new terms and conditions my plan as soon as I updated my payment details (rather than waiting for my actual renewal date in mid-March), I got an error message saying I was over my data storage limit so couldn’t install a new plug in.

I addressed this hurdle through the WordPress chat function, where the AI agent quickly turned me over to a real person. She promptly restored my 200 GB storage limit so that I could install and run the ShortPixel plug-in.

As expected, I had to wait a while for JetPack to run my site backup. Once that completed and I downloaded a copy, I ran the ShortPixel plug-in on a small group of files. Everything seemed to work okay. So I set ShortPixel to run on my entire media library. That took about 16 hours to run through my ~ 12,000 files.

Once completed, the size of my media library increased by about 6 GB! That’s because I elected to save my original files until I had a chance to find the ShortPixel backup and do some visual checks.

Quality Check and Outcome

I enlisted Mr GeoK’s help. He’s the one who had me uploading full resolution files for a long time. And he’s got a keener eye for how photos appear on the web than I do. Fortunately, he was fairly pleased with how the optimized images appeared.

My second big issue arose when I couldn’t find a copy of the ShortPixel backup of my original images to store locally. So I did another JetPack backup of everything and downloaded a copy of the backup. Then I took a deep breath, went into the ShortPixel widget settings and turned off backup.

Once everything processed behind the scenes, my media library was down to 10.7 GB – well under the new-to-me 50 GB limit included with my WordPress plan. I should have enough space for at least another 15 years of blogging – unless WordPress once again changes terms & conditions re: storage!! Going forward, ShortPixel will optimize each image as I upload it to my WordPress media library.

Final Thoughts

I wish I’d known in 2010 what I know now, about how easy it is to link to Flickr (and similar sites) for hosting the images I use in my blog posts. But since I didn’t, I had to learn and adapt.

ShortPixel worked very well for me. The plug-in includes free optimization for 100 images each month. Many months this will be more than enough for me. But when I’m writing about trips, I have plenty of credits left in the one-time block I purchased to do my bulk optimization. In fact, I don’t foresee ever needing to buy more credits!

I haven’t tried ShortPixel’s built in AI tools to general alt text or filenames, but may opt to do this next time I have a large number of images I’m uploading for a trip related blog post. One thing at a time!

Have you run into similar challenges when blogging or otherwise posting online? How did you solve them?

* NOTE – I have a WordPress hosted site. Back in 2010, when I migrated my blogging history over from Myspace, I was looking for a straightforward solution. If I had to do it all again today, I might choose a different platform. But with the rapid price increases for storage and processing, I wouldn’t be surprise to learn that most every blogging platform is undertaking similar changes. ¯_(ツ)_/¯