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Updated
September 19, 2023

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up the Smush plugin to optimize images on your multilingual site powered by WPML.

On This Page:

Getting started

Make sure that you have activated the Smush plugin by navigating to PluginsInstalled Plugins.

Also, make sure that you have activated the WPML Multilingual CMS, WPML String Translation, and WPML Translation Management plugins. In case you want to have different images for the pages that you will translate, please activate the Media Translation plugin.

For a better translation experience, we recommend that you activate the WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. To do this, go to the WPMLSettings page. Under the How to translate posts and pages section, check the “Use WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor” option.

Enabling WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor

WPML translation tools

We recommend using WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor as it offers affordable automatic translation, a glossary, a spell checker, and more!

Besides translating your site content yourself, you can also:

Setting Smush on multilingual sites

The Multilingual CMS plugin allows you to translate the media metadata such as the title, Alt text, and caption while translating the page or post content. You can also use a different image for the translation via the WPML Media Translation add-on. You can find more information about this in our guide about Media Translation.

Enabling automatic compression

In Smush settings, you can enable the feature that automatically compresses the default language image. This will also compress images in secondary languages (in case you’re using different images for translations). 

To enable this option, go to SmushDashboard and under the Settings section, enable the Automatically compress my images on upload option.

Enabling automatic compression

Disabling automatic compression

If you disable automatic compression, you will need to compress the images (attachments) manually. You can do this by navigating to SmushDashboard and under the Bulk Smush section, click the BULK SMUSH NOW button.

Clicking the bulk smush now button to optimize the images manually

Whether you are using the same images across translations or different ones, the Smush plugin will compress all the images. 

Need help?

Need help with optimizing your images using Smush on WPML multilingual sites? visit WPML’s support forum