Smush Wins Torque’s 2017 Plugin Madness Competition!

Smush Wins Torque’s 2017 Plugin Madness Competition!

Our Smush image compression and optimization plugin has been named Torque’s 2017 Plugin Madness champion!

Updated: 12/20/2018 – Smush Pro now includes WebP compression, automatic image scaling and 10GB of CDN storage on our 40 Tbps servers with 45 share points around the world.

Smush took on WordFence in the final championship round of the annual competition, knocking out the security plugin after winning 69% of the votes.

Torque Managing Editor Marie Dodson had a chat with our CEO James Farmer about the competition and you can read the interview over on the Torque website.

The competition pits 64 of the best plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory against each other. It’s modeled after the NCAA college basketball tournament March Madness and uses a bracket-based voting system to pit plugins against one another each week.

Last year, Smush made it to the top eight but bowed out of the competition after coming up against WooCommerce.

But this year, despite the tough competition, Smush moved through round after round, beating other image compression plugins, including EWWW Image Optimizer, Autoptimize — optimization plugin and Imagify Image Optimizer before defeating Redirection. In the semifinals, Smush took on Events Tickets and absolutely smushed the competition with a staggering 91% of the votes.

Smush doesn't just crush the competition, it compresses images too!
Smush doesn’t just crush the competition, it compresses images too!

Thank You for Supporting Smush!

A huge thank you must go to our members and everyone who voted for Smush during each round of Plugin Madness (and even bookmarked the page so they could come back and vote every day!). We couldn’t have done it without you and we’re really humbled by your support!

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Congratulations also to all the excellent plugins Smush came up against in the competition, and in particular WordFence, for putting up a good fight.

And thank you also to Torque Mag for organizing Plugin Madness. It’s a fantastic competition – now an annual staple of the WordPress community – that recognizes the fantastic plugins that are available in the repository, but also the work developers put into creating these free plugins for anyone to download and use on your WordPress website.

And, of course, this wouldn’t have happened without the amazing and talented people at WPMU DEV who have put so much work into Smush over the years, improving it after we adopted it in the repository, worked on designs, features, illustrations and more. Smush is definitely a team effort!

It goes without saying, if you aren’t already using Smush, you can download it for free from the WordPress.org repository. Or better yet, sign up for a free trial and give Smush Pro a go! It takes the (award winning!) free version of Smush to a whole ‘nother level.

Yay, we won! Thanks for supporting Smush and helping make it the only 5 star image compression and optimization plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory!

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Raelene Morey Raelene is the Founder of Words By Birds, a digital writing agency that works with startups, SaaS, B2B, and WordPress businesses on turning tech speak into words that convert. She was formerly the managing editor at WPMU DEV. A computer science grad turned newspaper journalist, when she’s not taming browser tabs, she likes brunching and bushwalking.