ShortPixel Adaptive Images vs. Cloudflare Polish & Mirage services
Nobody likes waiting, especially website visitors on a slow-loading website. People shouldn’t be forced to suffer when trying to find information or make purchases. If your customers don’t get what they want when they want it, they’ll be more likely to bounce than convert (a.k.a. leave your website without purchasing, reading or doing what you want them to). It’s about time you fix that with a WordPress image optimization plugin.
Introducing ShortPixel Adaptive Images (or SPAI for short), while on the other side we have Cloudflare Polish and Mirage services. Please note that Cloudflare has several other image services, like Cloudflare Images and Cloudflare Image Resizing. These are oriented towards developers, as they require manual development.
What sets those two apart?
| ShortPixel Adaptive Images | Cloudflare Image Optimization |
| is a freemium WordPress plugin | is a service that comes with a Cloudflare paid plan |
| 500MB free CDN quota / month (or 500GB for $9.99/month) | is not free at all, minimum $20/month |
| serves optimized images every time |
serves optimized images only if the page is cached on Cloudflare itself |
| does not need any additional configuration | needs you to configure Cloudflare to serve your site |
| automatically serves adaptive images | requires manual configuration through Cloudflare Image Resizing |
| has 3 compression levels | has 2 compression levels |
| supports WebP and AVIF files | supports only WebP files |
| uses a better performing CDN (bunny.net) | uses a worse performing CDN |
| has many more features and is much more flexible | only has a couple of settings (quality level and on/off) |
The verdict
ShortPixel Adaptive Images is definitely a winner. Give it a try!