“One picture is worth ten thousand words.”

This Chinese quote illustrates the importance of images delivering long messages. 

But can the same images dissatisfy a thousand? 

Yes! 

Everybody knows that ShortPixel is the leading image compression service, and because of this and WordPress being in more than 40% of all the websites in the world, our plugins ShortPixel Image Optimizer and ShortPixel Adaptive Images are very well known (and don’t forget their cousin Enable Media Replace, recently reaching 500,000 active installations!).

But from time to time we like to release little and very useful features that make use of our awesome compression API. This time we are introducing Archive Optimizer.

ShortPixel Image Optimizer is able to create and serve AVIF files since version 4.22. The delivery can be done in two different ways: using the <PICTURE> tag syntax or without altering the page code (via .htaccess).

The recommended method is via .htaccess, but it’s only available if you are using Apache as web server. If you are using NGINX, and if you are having trouble after creating AVIF files on your site and the supporting browsers are downloading the images instead of displaying them, you have come to the the right place.

WordPress ships by default with some code that may not be needed in all WordPress sites. This is normal, since WordPress needs to reach to all possible types of websites.

What that means is that most of us could get rid of useless code and therefore save a few bytes from our pages. So we will be effectively improving our site speed!

Let’s first see one by one all parts that can be removed, how to remove them, and at the end of the article we will provide the method to remove everything with a simple copy-paste.