Taking EWWW IO Off WP Engine’s Disallowed Plugins List

Plugins are a huge part of the WordPress ecosystem—they’re one of the key features that make it such a flexible platform. With more than 55,000 free plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Repository, as well as thousands of premium or “paid” plugins available in the market today, plugins represent an increasingly massive opportunity for adding new functionality to your websites.  

At WP Engine, we wholeheartedly embrace the use of plugins. In fact, we’ve built our Smart Plugin Manager product to make it easier for you to enjoy more of the plugin ecosystem by removing the time-consuming work of keeping plugins up to date while ensuring your, or your clients’ sites, never break.

At the same time, we maintain a short list of plugins that are disallowed on our platform in order to better ensure the security and overall performance of our customers’ sites, and to prevent customers from experiencing plugins that might have conflicts with WP Engine’s highly optimized platform.

While our number one priority is making sure our customers have the fastest and most secure WordPress sites on the web, we also understand that some plugins on the disallowed list are near and dear to our customers’ hearts. As such, the WP Engine Labs team actively works with plugin creators as well as our own engineering teams to find resolutions to issues that may have landed a plugin on our disallowed list. By way of example, in September 2019, the WP Engine Labs team worked with the popular Wordfence plugin to resolve compatibility issues and remove Wordfence from our disallowed list.

In that vein, we’re pleased to announce that after internal, cross-team efforts within WP Engine, as well as direct coordination with the plugin creator to resolve a platform compatibility issue, EWWW Image Optimizer is the latest plugin to be taken off of WP Engine’s disallowed list and is now available for use on all WP Engine-powered sites! 

“We’re thrilled to have been able to work with the wonderful folks at EWWW IO on resolving the platform compatibility issue that prevented customers from using EWWW IO’s primary plugin,” said David Vogelpohl the VP of Web Strategy at WP Engine and senior leader supporting WP Engine’s Labs team.

Shane Bishop, the CEO of EWWW added, “This is a huge win for our users, as it simplifies the installation and onboarding process. One of our biggest goals is to make image optimization more accessible, and I’m excited to have made such a huge advance in this effort.”

What is EWWW Image Optimizer? 

EWWW IO is a massively popular plugin and is relied on by hundreds of thousands of WordPress users to help optimize the images on their websites. EWWW IO’s image optimization technology can speed up your WordPress site and reduce page load times while taking up less storage space and bandwidth.   

EWWW IO automatically optimizes new images as you upload them, as well as images you’ve already uploaded, and it lets you convert images to the best file format needed. The plugin offers a great deal of flexibility in compression levels and the ability to optimize images uploaded and created by other plugins. EWWW IO even features special integrations with many other popular plugins.  

Our hope is that the more than 800,000 sites that use EWWW IO technology will now have a better experience when moving to WP Engine as they continue using one of their favorite plugins. On the flip side, we hope that this new compatibility offers existing WP Engine customers the opportunity to explore using EWWW IO on their sites.

Want to find out more about WP Engine and the ways we help our customers win with WordPress? Click here to find out more about how we support businesses of all sizes with automatic plugin maintenance, and visit our Solution Center to learn more about innovative resources that will help you build amazing digital experiences with WordPress.