How to Move From Imagify to ShortPixel: A Guide for Agencies

If you manage even five WordPress sites, swapping image optimization plugins isn’t a five-minute job. One wrong click multiplied across a client portfolio is a Monday morning you don’t want.

Moving from Imagify to ShortPixel Image Optimizer is straightforward, but only if you do it in the right order. Skip a step, and you can end up with images that are visibly degraded, with no way to recover the originals.

This guide walks you through it the way an agency should run it: site by site, repeatable, and with backups front and center.

Why a plugin swap needs a plan

Imagify and ShortPixel Image Optimizer both compress your images and serve lighter versions to visitors. They just make different decisions about how aggressive to be.

The problem starts when you optimize an image that’s already been optimized. The second plugin doesn’t know what the first one threw away. It just compresses what it sees.

That’s called 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
• A general “this used to look better” feeling

Imagify’s default Lossy is already aggressive. Let ShortPixel Image Optimizer run another pass on top of that, and you can easily end up with images that look noticeably worse than they should. And the original is gone.

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 Imagify’s backups, 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 the client disabled backups. Maybe they were lost in a host migration. Either way, the old library stays as Imagify 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 backups exist

Open the client site and check whether Imagify actually has the originals.

Go to Settings > Imagify and look at the Backup original images setting. If it’s on (it is by default), you’re probably fine. To confirm, open the site via FTP or your host’s file manager and check this folder:

/wp-content/uploads/backup/

You should see files there, organized by year and month, mirroring your uploads folder. If the folder is empty or missing, skip to Path B.

If Imagify was optimizing images from Custom Folders too, check this path as well:

/imagify-backup/

Step 2 — Take a full site backup

Non-negotiable. Before any bulk action, back up the whole site: files and database. UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, your host’s snapshot tool, whatever you normally use.

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 Imagify

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:

1. Tick the box at the top to select all images on the page
2. From the Bulk Actions dropdown, pick Restore Original
3. Click Apply

Imagify 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 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.

For images optimized through Custom Folders, repeat the same process from Media > Other Media.

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. If anything didn’t restore, the Imagify column usually tells you why.

Step 5 — Deactivate and uninstall Imagify

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.

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. Modern browsers get the best format, older browsers fall back automatically
• 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:

• The previous developer disabled Imagify’s backup option
• The site was migrated to a new host and the backup folder didn’t come along
• Backups were deleted to reclaim disk space
• 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 operation, 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 Imagify. 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. Deactivate and uninstall Imagify
3. Install ShortPixel Image Optimizer and configure it
4. Go to Settings > ShortPixel > Processing and confirm Optimize media on upload is enabled
5. 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 Imagify 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.

Use subaccounts or API Key Aliases to keep client billing clean

ShortPixel lets you create subaccounts from a single parent account, each with its own API key and credit allocation. Alternatively, you could use API Key Aliases. For agencies, this is how you should structure things from day one.

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

• Its own API key, used in the plugin on that site
• A credit quota you control
• A separate optimization report you can pull at invoicing time

One client’s heavy month doesn’t eat into another client’s quota. And you never have to guess who optimized what.

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, and apply it without thinking on every site. Document it once. The configuration above 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.

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), notes.

Quick recap

The two-line version:

• Backups exist: restore originals → uninstall Imagify → install ShortPixel → bulk optimize. Use any compression level.
• No backups: uninstall Imagify → install ShortPixel → choose Lossless compression level or mark images as optimized before running a bulk optimization. New uploads get optimized; old ones don’t lose quality.

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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