Smush.it finds a home at Yahoo!

Things are changing around here.

When Stoyan and I created Smush.it we were scratching our own itch. As web developers we had spent way too much time optimizing images by hand, and we thought there must be a better solution. Optimizing images was far more important to overall site performance than people were giving it credit for being. Stoyan found that on average 50% of page weight was comprised of images, and that often those images were 30-40% larger than they needed to be. That translated to a lot of image bloat dragging down the web.

When we released Smush it at The Ajax Experience last year we were really excited to see what people did with it; building on the APIs to create a WordPress extension and other cool tools. Since the release we’ve smushed millions of images and put the web on a much needed diet.

Today is a great day for Smush it because Yahoo! decided to accept it into their family of tools. This will allow the tool to run on fanatically maintained servers, with the Yahoo! style quality of service. It doesn’t get any better than that. I feel like my baby is all grown up and going off to college! 🙂

Want to Optimize Images like a Pro?

Stoyan and I have contributed a chapter to Even Faster Web Sites, that outlines all the fantastic tricks you can use to make your sites smaller. We hope you find it useful, and of course we welcome feedback! It will show you how to make image optimization part of your own system, and give you all the information you need to make images as small as possible.

What’s changed?

They’ve been doing all the quiet background work to get things set up at Yahoo!. In addition, Smush.it functionality has been included in YSlow 2.0 (now in beta!), so you can get all of your performance information in one place. You’ll start seeing changes in look at feel, but Yahoo! assures us the APIs and functionality won’t change. We are proud that this tool has helped so many people improve their site performance. Thank you all for supporting us and using Smush.it.

You can help Yahoo! by providing feedback for Smush.it on their mailing list.

My favorite Smush it story

Jaydee, a web developer in Singapore, came to my two-day boot camp. On day one, he heard about optimizing images, when he came back on day two he had already smushed all the images on his site and pushed the changes live. He showed a fantastic commitment to making the Yahoo user experience even faster.


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13 responses to “Smush.it finds a home at Yahoo!”

  1. Will Avatar
    Will

    Congrats!! Love the tool!!

    Not bad really: “Smushed 9.22% or 6.87 KB from the size of your image(s).”

    This was after I had already “smushed” my 50 images by hand. Nice!

  2. John Curtis Avatar

    Nicole,

    I wanted to show you this tool and see if you had any thoughts (code name TinyOptimizer). It is used for crushing png’s, minifying css and js all with a desktop app that is driven by webservices. The advantage here is that it will replace them in the directory where they exist (and backup the originals). I was interested in any ideas you had that might make it better. We also have an open API to see what the community might come up with for other applications.

    http://www.tinycdn.com/Utilities/TinyOptimizer

    Thanks
    John

  3. Ferinannnd Avatar

    Добавил в закладки. Теперь буду почаще читать!

  4. srikanth Avatar

    Congrats!

    I’m a huge fan of Smush.it and a regular follower of your Tweeets (tinged with humor) 🙂

    Thanks

  5. Seth Avatar
    Seth

    Congrats! Hope you got a sweet bonus for you good work. In the transition of moving everything over to YSlow, Smush.it seemed to have lost the ability to upload local images. Now my company has to wait until images go into production (or put them up in public locations) to cut their sizes.

    1. Nicole Avatar
      Nicole

      @Seth – There are a couple of options open to you to give feedback to Yahoo! They have a YSlow feedback form and the Exceptional Performance forum. They will want to know that you miss this valuable feature.

  6. Dennis Hall Avatar

    I won’t feel sad if this gets moderated into oblivion, just wanted to let you know that the twitter javascript you’re using is throwing a javascript error on line 12, trying to get element by id .. probably of an element that does not exist .. and then manipulate the nonexistent element. I also realize that it is external.

    also, I appreciate your efforts in sharing with the community. thank you.

  7. […] April 29 2009, Smush.It was accepted into Yahoo’s family of developer […]

  8. […] developed a plugin last year that integrated Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan’s Smush.it service with WordPress.   In a nutshell, it reduced the file size of all images […]

  9. Ronette @ flowershop Avatar

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  10. Belinda @ flowers and gifts Avatar

    I’ve been researching the WWW for my research on this theme. I’m so happy what you shared adds a new dimension to the data I’m collecting. I truly appreciate the way which you look at this subject, it offer me a unique way of looking at it now. Thanks for the share.

  11. Sandy Avatar

    very informative thank you for a nice site

  12. […] Google is not alone in their quest for speed; the fantastic speed measurement and recommendation tool Yslow for Firebug by Yahoo is used by many to optimize page load speed. Yahoo has introduced other speed enhancement Tools including the very newly released boomerang which is some JavaScript that runs on each page and measures various performance matrices. Yahoo also provides other awesome performance enhancing free tools such as smush.it. […]