Companies Using EWWW Image Optimizer

I run the crawler behind these numbers, and EWWW Image Optimizer is harder to count than most WordPress plugins, because its main job happens before a page is ever served. It compresses images in the media library and writes smaller files back to disk. Nothing in the page says that happened. A domain counts here only when one of EWWW's front-end features reaches the page: its Lazy Load script, loaded from the plugin's folder, or the inline check its JavaScript WebP rewriting adds, which defines a global called ewww_webp_supported. Our October 2026 crawl finds 131,888 live domains doing one or the other, 72,183 of them matched to a company, 5th of 45 in Performance Optimization.

We also loaded all 90 candidate company pages in mid-October 2026. 73 showed EWWW's marker. Of the other 17, 16 sat behind bot walls or timed out, and one showed EWWW's lazy-load image attributes without the script the rule reads.

What the count can't see

Of the 73 pages that showed the marker, 54 got it from Lazy Load and 19 from the JavaScript WebP check; six of those 19 also wrapped images in picture tags. That tells you what's missing. A site that only compresses images is invisible to us. So is one that serves WebP through Apache rewrite rules, or through picture tags alone, since neither adds a script. So is a site using EWWW's Easy IO CDN without its lazy loading; only one of our 73 pages served images from Easy IO's exactdn.com hosts. WordPress.org lists 1+ million active installations. It counts installations and we count live domains with a front-end feature switched on, so the two will never match.

Sales signal: every domain here has gone past basic compression and switched on lazy loading or WebP delivery. That owner cares about how images load as well as how big they are.

The chart is mostly coverage

The chart reads 107,188 in June, 123,803 in July, 126,489 in August, 130,902 in September and 131,888 in October. Most of the June to July step is ours: the set of domains we crawl turns over every month, with dead sites dropping out and newly found ones added, and our detection widens over time. The same two effects run through the later months, so I wouldn't call them growth either.

Since we began tracking EWWW on 16 March 2026, 15,212 domains have dropped it. A few days after that figure was taken, 1,363 of 15,232 such domains still ran EWWW on another hostname, about one in eleven, so most of them left it everywhere.

"EWWW's real footprint is its compression, and compression is invisible to a crawler. The 131,888 domains are the sites that went one step further and turned on lazy loading or WebP delivery." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: treat this as a large, settled base with steady churn. The chart doesn't support a growth story, so don't sell one internally.

Who runs it

60.8% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 25.0% have 11 to 50. 754 have more than 1,000 staff, and those mostly run EWWW on one property. Crédit Agricole uses it on its integrated report, Keurig Dr Pepper on its investor site, McGill on its Reporter news site, Targobank and BUT on their careers sites, and the Gates Foundation on a supplier resources site. A few run it on the main domain: ADEO, IFF, Menzies Aviation and Hillenbrand.

Real estate is the one vertical that stands out. It's 4.74% of matched companies, second only to construction (5.15%) and about twice its share on Autoptimize's page. Coldwell Banker's LinkedIn record matches 85 live EWWW domains, mostly agent and office sites, and Windermere runs it on windermere.com. 72 live EWWW domains carry the page title "Agent Websites", and 348 more returned a Wordfence block page to our crawler, several of them real estate sites.

Sales signal: at a brokerage the buyer is whoever builds the agent sites, often a vendor serving hundreds of agents at once. One conversation there can cover many domains.

Where it runs

The United States has 17,777 matched companies and Germany 6,838, about two and a half to one. The United Kingdom (5,240) and France (5,223) are almost level, then Brazil (3,305), Italy (3,223) and Spain (2,822). Japan is 11th with 1,733, and Xserver, a Japanese host, shows on 5.64% of clean live EWWW domains, more than WP Engine (3.14%). Industry is flat: the top ten add up to 29.94%.

Sales signal: outside the US, the UK and France are equal-sized markets for anything sold to EWWW users, and Japan is large enough to justify Japanese documentation.

Used alongside, not swapped

No pair passes our switching tests, and the overlaps explain why. 8,983 domains run EWWW and Autoptimize today, out of 10,412 ever seen with both. 5,425 run it with WP Fastest Cache (6,600 ever) and 1,018 with Perfmatters (1,274 ever). In each of those pairs, about 80% or more of the domains ever seen with both still run both. ShortPixel, the only image optimiser in the table, overlaps on just 6 domains today, and its row counts only sites loading its CDN script.

"A site that runs EWWW usually runs a file or cache plugin too. 8,983 domains pair it with Autoptimize today. They're building a speed stack out of several plugins." - David Thomson, CTO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: a caching plugin or faster host doesn't need to displace EWWW. Pitch the problem images don't solve: server response time and page caching.

The stack around it

These percentages are of the 132,027 clean live EWWW domains. WordPress is on 99.57%, Elementor on 31.33%, Divi on 7.29% and wpBakery on 2.98%. Cloudflare fronts 24.65%. Google Analytics runs on 68.97% and Site Kit on 10.19%. Complianz (7.47%) and CookieYes (7.16%) are the most common consent tools. GoDaddy shows on 13.74%, but that rule reads DNS; among real hosts, Xserver (5.64%), Hostinger (4.93%), WP Engine (3.14%) and OVHcloud (2.75%) lead.

Sales signal: an Elementor site with EWWW's lazy loading on has already worked on its images. Its next speed problem is usually scripts or hosting, and three in ten EWWW domains fit that profile.

What it costs

The plugin is free on WordPress.org, published by Exactly WWW LLC of Montana, and its about page says Shane Bishop started it in 2012. EWWW's plans page (checked October 2026) lists Standard at $8 a month or $80 a year, Growth at $16 or $160 and Infinite at $32 or $320. All three include the Easy IO CDN for unlimited sites and images, automatic WebP and AVIF, Compress API credits and the SWIS Performance plugin, which adds page caching and CSS and JavaScript optimisation. Bandwidth runs 50, 200 and 400 GB.

Sales signal: paid EWWW plans now include page caching and a CDN, the ground caching plugins and image CDNs already hold. Free users who outgrow compression are the market all of them want.

Key takeaways

1. 131,888 live domains, 5th of 45 in Performance Optimization and its largest dedicated image optimiser, but a floor: compression alone is invisible.

2. Most users are small: 60.8% have 1 to 10 staff, and large companies run it on a single property.

3. Real estate is second at 4.74%, driven by brokerage agent sites.

4. It sits beside other speed plugins: 8,983 domains pair it with Autoptimize today.

5. 15,212 domains dropped it since March 2026, about one in eleven of them still running it on another hostname.

How to use this list

Filter by country and company size, then group large companies by the property that runs EWWW. For every EWWW domain with company and stack data, explore TechnologyChecker.io. Our guide to technology detection methods explains why a rule that reads scripts sees lazy loading but not compression.