How to Move From EWWW Image Optimizer to ShortPixel: A Guide for Agencies

Moving from EWWW Image Optimizer to ShortPixel Image Optimizer is straightforward, but the process is shaped by one specific detail. EWWW keeps backups of your original images by default, either locally on your server or in the cloud if you’re on Premium, and has a built-in restore action.

That makes the migration cleaner than with most plugins, but only if those backups are actually still around. Across a client portfolio, that’s not a safe assumption to make without checking.

Why a plugin swap needs a plan

The problem with switching image optimization plugins isn’t the switch itself. It’s what happens when the second plugin optimizes an image the first plugin already touched. The new tool has no idea what was thrown away. It just compresses what it sees.

That’s double compression, and it shows up as:

• Soft edges and lost detail in product photos
• Banding in skies, gradients, and skin tones
• Visible blockiness in dark areas of JPEGs
• Noticeable quality degradation that’s impossible to reverse without the originals

EWWW’s default settings are relatively conservative (lossless on the free tier), but many agencies and developers crank it up to lossy or “maximum” compression for better savings. Run another lossy pass on top of that with ShortPixel, and the quality could be worse.

That’s why the migration has two paths, and picking the right one for each site matters.

The two paths

Before touching anything, ask: do we want ShortPixel Image Optimizer to re-optimize the existing library, or just take over from here?

Path A — Restore the originals first, then let ShortPixel Image Optimizer optimize. Cleaner option. Restore EWWW’s backups (local or cloud, depending on what’s available), uninstall it, install ShortPixel Image Optimizer, run a fresh optimization on untouched files. You end up with one plugin, one set of settings, and full freedom to pick Lossy, Glossy, or Lossless.

Path B — Keep the existing optimizations and use ShortPixel Image Optimizer only for new uploads. This is the fallback when restoration isn’t possible. Maybe backups were never enabled. Maybe the 30-day cloud window has passed. Either way, the old library stays as EWWW left it, and ShortPixel Image Optimizer handles everything from here on.

For most agency workflows, Path A is the one you want whenever it’s available. We’ll cover both.

Path A: the clean migration

Step 1 — Confirm what kind of backup the site has

EWWW has two backup options, and which one is active changes what you have to work with.

Local backups (free tier): EWWW stores originals on the server in a separate folder.

If the backup folder exists and contains image files mirroring the uploads structure, you have local backups to work with.

Cloud backups (Premium tier): EWWW Premium stores originals on EWWW’s servers for 30 days. To check, go to Settings > EWWW Image Optimizer > Local and look at the Backup Originals setting. If it’s set to “Cloud” and the site has been Premium for less than 30 days, the originals are recoverable through the plugin interface.

If neither backup type is available, or the cloud window has passed, skip to Path B.

Step 2 — Take a full site backup

Non-negotiable. Before any bulk action, back up the whole site: files and database.

For agencies, this is also the right moment to spin up staging and test the migration there first. WooCommerce stores in particular don’t react well to surprises with product images.

Step 3 — Restore the originals in EWWW

The restore process depends on which backup type the site uses.

For local backups: In the WordPress admin, go to Media > Library and switch to List View. Top-right corner, click Screen Options and bump Number of items per page to 500 or 1000.

Then:

• Tick the box at the top to select all images on the page
• From the Bulk Actions dropdown, pick Restore Originals
• Click Apply

EWWW will work through the list and swap the optimized files back for the originals. Move through every page until the whole library is done.

For cloud backups (Premium): Same process, but the plugin pulls files from EWWW’s servers instead of the local folder. The restore action in the Bulk Actions dropdown handles both cases automatically.

For a library with 10,000+ images, this takes a while, and your browser tab needs to stay open. Run it in chunks, ideally outside peak hours, and keep an eye on server load. Cloud restores are also bound by your API connection, so flaky connections can drag things out.

Step 4 — Spot-check the restoration

Open a handful of images in the Media Library and check that they’re back to their original file size and quality. Compare a few thumbnails too, since EWWW optimizes those alongside the masters.

If anything didn’t restore, EWWW’s status column usually tells you why. The most common reasons are missing backup files (someone cleaned the folder) or expired cloud backups (past the 30-day window).

Step 5 — Deactivate and uninstall EWWW

Now you can safely remove the plugin.

Don’t skip the uninstall step. Two image optimization plugins active at the same time is a mess: both will hook into the upload process, both will try to manage WebP and AVIF generation, and you’ll lose an afternoon figuring out which one is doing what.

One EWWW-specific note: if the site was using EWWW’s WebP delivery (either through Apache rewrite rules in .htaccess or JS/Picture WebP rewriting), clean those up too. Leftover rewrite rules can interfere with how ShortPixel serves its own WebP and AVIF versions.

Step 6 — Install ShortPixel Image Optimizer and configure it

Install ShortPixel Image Optimizer from the WordPress repository. Activate it, paste in your API key, and configure your settings before running anything in bulk.

A sensible default for most client sites:

• Compression: Glossy. Strong file size reduction with no visible quality loss for typical web content
• WebP and AVIF: both enabled. ShortPixel generates both formats in a single pass and handles delivery automatically. Modern browsers get AVIF, slightly older ones get WebP, and the rest fall back to the original JPEG or PNG without any rewrite rules to maintain
• Backup originals: on. Always. This is your ticket to re-optimizing later if needed
• Thumbnail optimization: on. WordPress generates many sized versions, and that’s what visitors actually load
• Resize large uploads: 1920 to 2560px max width. Plenty for retina, no wasted pixels

For photography clients or portfolio sites, drop Compression to Lossless or test Glossy carefully on a few representative pages before bulk processing.

Step 7 — Run a bulk optimization with ShortPixel Image Optimizer

Go to Media > Bulk ShortPixel and start the process. Because you restored originals first, every image is being compressed once, by one plugin, at the level you picked.

That’s your clean baseline.

Path B: when you can’t restore the originals

Sometimes restoration just isn’t possible. Common reasons with EWWW:

• Backups were never enabled in the plugin settings
• The local backup folder was deleted to reclaim disk space
• The cloud backup window (30 days) has passed
• The site was migrated to a new host and /wp-content/ewww/ didn’t come along
• Nobody knows what state the originals were ever in

In any of these cases, the existing Media Library is what you have to work with.

The key principle: don’t re-optimize the old images with Lossy or Glossy. If you must run a bulk optimization, set ShortPixel to Lossless first or mark them as already optimized when ShortPixel is enabled.

Here’s why. The images have already had quality stripped out by EWWW (especially if the site was using lossy or maximum compression). Lossy or Glossy will strip out more, and there’s no Ctrl+Z for that. Lossless, on the other hand, doesn’t throw away visual information, or simply mark them as optimized. It just finds more efficient ways to encode what’s already there. The savings are modest, but the images stay safe.

The Path B migration looks like this:

1. Take a full site backup (same as Path A)
2. If EWWW was using WebP rewrite rules in .htaccess, remove them
3. Deactivate and uninstall EWWW
4. Install ShortPixel Image Optimizer and configure it
5. Go to Settings > ShortPixel > Processing and confirm Optimize media on upload is enabled
6. Don’t run a bulk optimization unless you set compression to Lossless first or mark the images as already optimized

That last step is what protects you. A bulk optimization with ShortPixel Image Optimizer processes the entire library, including everything EWWW already touched. Leave it alone, and the old files stay as they are. New uploads get optimized from day one.

Agency workflow: doing this across a portfolio

One site? The steps above are all you need. Twenty sites? The migration itself is the easy part. The hard part is doing it consistently across every client, and tracking what’s happening where.

Centralize client management with subaccounts or API key aliases

This is the single biggest workflow upgrade ShortPixel offers agencies, and it’s worth setting up before you migrate even one site.

ShortPixel lets you create subaccounts from a single parent account, each with its own API key and credit allocation. If you prefer a flatter structure, API key aliases give you the same per-client separation without nested accounts. Either way, you get one place to log into for everything.

Set up the parent account once, then create one subaccount (or alias) per client site. Each gets:

• Its own API key, used in the plugin on that site
• A credit quota you control and can adjust as needed
• A separate optimization report you can pull at invoicing time
• Independent usage tracking, so one client’s heavy month doesn’t eat into another’s

This is where ShortPixel pulls clearly ahead of EWWW for portfolio management. EWWW is built around per-site licensing and activation, which means tracking usage, renewing keys, and pulling reports involves logging into each site separately. With ShortPixel, the entire portfolio is visible from one dashboard. For an agency managing fifteen, fifty, or two hundred sites, that consolidation alone justifies the switch.

Standardize your settings before you start

Pick one default ShortPixel configuration that fits the majority of your portfolio (simple business sites, blogs, basic e-commerce). Apply it without thinking on every site. Document it once. The configuration in Step 6 is a fine starting point.

Deviations are okay. Photography portfolios will want Lossless. News sites might want more aggressive resizing. But every deviation should be intentional and documented in that client’s internal notes.

The goal isn’t perfect uniformity. The goal is that any team member opening a ShortPixel setup six months from now immediately understands what they’re looking at.

Take advantage of unified WebP and AVIF handling

One of the practical wins from this migration: ShortPixel handles next-gen format delivery in a single integrated flow. WebP and AVIF are generated during the same optimization pass, stored alongside the originals, and served automatically to compatible browsers, either via .htaccess rules or via CDN.

For agencies, this matters because it removes a class of problems that EWWW migrations often surface: stale rewrite rules, conflicts with caching plugins, JS-based WebP delivery breaking when a theme updates. Once ShortPixel is configured on a site, modern format delivery is just on. You don’t have to revisit it during the next plugin audit.

Migrate in waves

Don’t plan a “migration weekend” where you switch everything at once. Something will go sideways on one or two sites, and you want bandwidth to handle it.

A reasonable cadence:

• Week 1: pick three low-risk sites (your own marketing site, an internal tool, a small client). Get your process tight.
• Week 2 onward: migrate two to five sites per week, batched by similarity. All WooCommerce in one batch. All blogs in another.
• Keep a simple tracker: site name, date migrated, path used (A or B), backup type found (local, cloud, none), notes.

Quick recap

The two-line version:

• Backups exist (local or cloud): restore originals → uninstall EWWW → install ShortPixel → bulk optimize. Use any compression level.
• No backups, or cloud window expired: uninstall EWWW → install ShortPixel → choose Lossless compression level or mark images as optimized before running a bulk optimization. New uploads get optimized; old ones stay as they are.

Either way: full backup before you start, subaccounts or API key aliases for clean client billing, and a standardized setup across the portfolio. The migration itself is half an hour or less per site. Everything else is what keeps you from inheriting a mess six months from now.

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