ShortPixel Adaptive Images vs Scalability Pro
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Get Scalability Pro →Comparing ShortPixel Adaptive Images with Scalability Pro? This page breaks down the key differences and similarities so you can find the best fit for your WordPress or WooCommerce store.
Overview of ShortPixel Adaptive Images
ShortPixel Adaptive Images is a CDN-based image optimisation service for WordPress. It serves images at the right size and format for each visitor's device, converting them to WebP or AVIF as needed. It works via a CDN proxy layer rather than modifying files on your server, making it easy to set up without touching your media library.
Visit ShortPixel Adaptive Images →
How Scalability Pro differs from ShortPixel Adaptive Images
All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and Scalability Pro is no different. Here is what sets it apart:
Your WooCommerce shop page went from over 180 seconds to 0.4 seconds – on 820,000 products. Scalability Pro is the performance plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce sites that have grown too big for their own good. It adds the right database indexes, rewrites your slow queries to use them, and switches off the features that quietly grind to a halt once you pass 5,000 products, orders or users.
- Makes WP_Query fast and keeps it fast as your catalogue grows
- Speeds up archives, wp-admin, imports, exports and XML sitemaps
- Typically around a 10x boost on large imports, with lower CPU while they run
- A toolbox of optimisations you toggle on and off, no code required
- Complements your cache – it fixes the queries caching cannot
Rated 4.82 out of 5 by 34 customers. 60-day money-back guarantee.
ShortPixel Adaptive Images solves browser-side image delivery — ensuring each visitor receives the right image size in the best modern format. Scalability Pro works server-side, targeting the WooCommerce database queries that slow your TTFB before a single byte reaches the browser. They operate on different layers of the performance stack and are complementary rather than competing.
How to choose between ShortPixel Adaptive Images and Scalability Pro?
ShortPixel Adaptive Images is a strong choice for image delivery optimisation, but slow SQL queries cause TTFB problems that image optimisation cannot resolve. Scalability Pro is built specifically for those database bottlenecks, tested against one-million-product WooCommerce stores, and available via a free trial for staging validation.
What do others say about Scalability Pro?
Well. Very long story in short format. I set up site for my client. All products are imported via XML / JSON from different wholesale warehouses. At the moment 26k total products / 18k in stock. With over 10k products and with Divi theme site started to slow down. Divi itself is quite heavy at these level because of per post / taxonomy templates and generating static assets per post / tax. Even if these Divi side optimizations are turned off, site is quite slow. So we started testing. Keep in mind – we had frontend assets optimized so LCP / FCP etc metrics were on par with that kind of structure. Biggest problem was on backend. For Google / GTMetrix it meant TBT (total blocking time) or as I understand – time for server to return data – that was around 12 seconds. Turned off Divi "performance" we got it 3 seconds down but still over 8 seconds. So, here comes Scalabilty Pro. At first it was like – meh, i get it down to 3 seconds. Store became usable. More or less. But after wee bit tweaking and testing, combining with Perfmatters and WP Rocket – at the moment we sit TBT 10ms dektop / 10-700ms mobile. And we can use page preloading again which previously clogged down DB. So, SSP only with indexes did a miracle on a site. With other tweaks admin pages are usable and site mostly works faster than small static pages. And this all runs on shared web hosting at zone.ee server. In another hand – Dave is awesome. Very fast support on Discord – explain problem and soon you have a solution.
Dave made it right, we had express speed up in admin area. I almost gave up with woocommerce, but after this speed up we can definitely work smoothly. Thanks Dave
Recommend Scalability Pro if you have a lot of products and use wpallimport or wpallexport, improve import and export and also speed up your website.
Scalability Pro Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →Articles about Scalability Pro
View all articles →- New SQL enhancement for Scalability Pro to fix WooCommerce long-running query in the product-hero block
- Speeding up WooCommerce 7 (wp-admin and imports)
- More speed boosts for wp-admin and imports with Scalability Pro upgrade
- Performance boost for WooCommerce onboarding code on large sites
- December Development Update
- More speed, more updates, and a bit of a roadmap for our plugins
- Beta downloads and historic plugin versions now in your account
- Upgrades to multiple Super Speedy Plugins plugins now in beta
- Bridge theme speed improvements included in latest Scalability Pro update
- Faster Woo Widgets beta
- Speed hacks for the Newspaper theme by tagDiv: Transform your site speed
- Making the WPNotif plugin faster
- Speeding up WP All Import imports using Scalability Pro
- Performance Optimisation for various XML Sitemap plugins
- Getting Rehub Working with Super Speedy Plugins
- Rehub Theme Performance and Scalability Review
- Foundthru demo site of Super Speedy Plugins plugins
- Scaling WooCommerce to 1 million products (my talk at WordCamp Brighton)
What's new in Scalability Pro?
6.23 (20th May 2026)
- Added a "Recheck Licenses" button above the licence table on the Super Speedy Settings page so customers have a clear way to refresh licence status after a renewal or upgrade without scrolling down to the licence-key field. The button is disabled until a licence key is entered/saved and re-enables as you type.
- The Recheck flow now also force-bypasses the auth-server's own 1-hour licence cache (via a `force=1` flag on the `wpiapi/check_product_key` call), so renewals/upgrades that completed less than an hour before a recheck no longer show as expired/exceeded. Normal admin page loads continue to use both caches as before — only an explicit Recheck click bypasses them. (Lives in the `super-speedy-settings` submodule, so the change propagates to every Super Speedy plugin.)
6.22 (13th May 2026)
- Security: added capability checks and nonces to every admin AJAX endpoint that was previously reachable by low-privilege or unauthenticated users (slow query log fetch, index create/drop/drop-all, symlink create/delete, wp-config rewrite, slow query log truncate, term recount, profiling results save, cache clears, settings export/import, CSV export, action scheduler maintenance, and the WP All Import diagnostic helper)
- Security: removed `wp_ajax_nopriv_*` registrations from the slow query log fetch and the post-count / author-count cache clear endpoints — these were admin-only operations that should never have been exposed to unauthenticated visitors
- Security: escaped every column rendered in the Slow Query Log admin table (`time`, `url`, `query`, `stacktrace`, `duration`) — prevents stored XSS via a poisoned slow-query log entry being executed when an admin views the tab
- Security: fixed the "Create symlink" button, which previously created a dangling `wp-content/db.php` (the source path the button used had never existed in the plugin) and would have fatal-ed the site on the next request; the slow-query drop-in (`db.php` + `profiling-queries.php`) has been moved into `tabs/slow-query-log/wp-content/` to match the path the button always expected, every readlink check across the tab now derives the path from `plugin_dir_path(__FILE__)` so it works regardless of the plugin's installed folder name, and the symlink source is validated with `is_file()`/`realpath()` before linking
- Refactored: the slow-query-log drop-in files now live under `tabs/slow-query-log/wp-content/` so the tab is self-contained ahead of the planned split of each tab into a separate add-on plugin
- Security: hardened `spro_search_terms` (product attribute search) — requires `edit_products` and null-checks the taxonomy so PHP 8 no longer fatals on an unknown taxonomy
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