Smush.it

» see smushit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Smush.it was built because somebody did not want to give another conference talk. Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan were on Yahoo's Exceptional Performance team, the group that produced YSlow and the web performance rules that everyone was quoting at each other in 2008, and the rule about images was the one nobody followed. So instead of a slide deck they built the thing: a page where you dropped in images and got back a zip of smaller ones. They demoed it at The Ajax Experience in Boston and Sullivan posted it on her blog on 30 September 2008.

What it did under the hood was unglamorous and exactly right. It ran the proven open-source optimizers server-side and stripped the metadata nobody needed, without touching a visible pixel. None of that was new. The service existed because almost nobody was going to install command-line tools to do it themselves, and a web form was something people would actually use.

Then the plugin happened. WP Smush.it pushed images through the Yahoo service automatically as WordPress users uploaded them, which meant site owners who had never heard of image optimization were getting it anyway. By 2015 that plugin sat on roughly 300,000 active installs. A free API from a large company, with no key and no quota, had quietly become load-bearing for a visible slice of the web.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the day it stopped ~

The archive dates this to the day. www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/ served its normal page on 10 March 2015. From 13 March onward every single request is a redirect, and the destination is the tell: smushit.eperf.vip.ac4.yahoo.com. That is an internal Yahoo host name, eperf for Exceptional Performance and ac4 for one of their data centers, and it resolves for nobody on the public internet. Somebody pulled the public front end and left the redirect pointing at the machine behind it.

There was no deprecation notice and no email to the plugin authors. GeekWire asked Yahoo what had happened and got nothing back. Stefanov, who co-wrote the thing, published a post on 6 April 2015 titled "smush.it is dead, long live smushing" that opens with him guessing: Yahoo looks like it has stopped maintaining the service, he wrote, and he had no inside information about it.

~ the cleanup ~

The WordPress plugin had to be gutted first, because an optimizer that silently fails is worse than no optimizer. Its developers ripped the Smush.it integration out and rebuilt the compression locally, keeping the name, which is why "Smush" remains a plugin on millions of WordPress installs years after the service it was named for died. A French developer put up reSmush.it as a free replacement API, deliberately occupying the same slot. The rest of the profession had already moved on to doing it during the build, with imagemin and whatever task runner was fashionable, which is where image optimization still lives.

March 2015 was not a random month for Yahoo to drop a free developer service. The company was deep in restructuring and layoffs, closing products in batches, and a tool with no revenue and no login attached to it was never going to survive a review. Switching one off costs an afternoon, and the cost lands entirely on the people who built against it.

~ why image bytes were personal ~

I learned image weight the way everyone on a modem learned it. At 33.6k a page with four unoptimized JPEGs was a measurable wait, and you developed opinions about GIF palettes without ever calling it optimization. The Turkish forums I was on had hard limits on signature images in kilobytes, which turned the whole thing into a sport: fit your hardware list and a picture into whatever the board allowed. Smush.it is the industrial version of that instinct, built by people whose job was shaving bytes off other people's pages, and killed by a parent company that could not find a line item for it.

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