As of version 5.0, the “Process in the front-end” option is no longer available. This option allowed you to automatically optimize images added by users, for example from a form they filled out. At the same time, it triggered the normal optimization processes for websites where administrators were not always logging in (in such cases, the optimization was not triggered automatically).
We decided to remove this option due to performance issues. For busy websites, it could easily put the entire website down, especially on servers with very few available resources, as it triggered a call to the backend for every click on the website to check if something needed to be processed by ShortPixel.
As of version 5.6, you can achieve the same results with one of the following options:
- You can add your own custom pages to the list of pages ShortPixel works in (here’s the original list). Please see the section “Additional pages for background optimization” in Actions and filters of ShortPixel Image Optimizer.
- You can enable Background mode.
- You can do the processing using the embedded WP-CLI support.
- You can set up a cron job to run SPIO whenever you want.