I'm curious if there's any low hanging fruit to speed up a PHP script. For example, is one of these better/faster than the other? //Code 1 echo 'Hello ' . 'World'; //Code 2 echo 'Hello '; echo 'W... More on stackoverflow.com

I am just wondering what the best way to optimize PHP code is. Is there any way to compress PHP files, or would removing all of the white space improve performance. Any ways to improve performance ... More on stackoverflow.com

https://stackoverflow.com/q/4298001/1035297

TL;DR - No.

I would contact the old developer. If he wrote company code during work hours I think he has no other option than unlock it. Check with you companies lawyer what options there are (e.g. suing the developer)

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Since I manage a ton of not-built-by-me websites for different clients, each with their own hosting plans and often with their own plugins. Including different image optimizer plugins. So a year or so ago I took advantage of the situation and did a test of live optimizers on live websites. Here's what I wrote up after that test. I have a bunch of clients who use various image-compression utilities including EWW, Smush, Imagify, and SiteGround's SG Optimizer (which does optimization as well.) So I decided to just try a test to see who could do what. I uploaded the image to each site, ran the optimizer, and then downloaded it again. Original image size: 915KB, a 1920x1069 pixel photo Smush: 915KB -- Smush claimed it reduced the image by 10% but the downloaded file size was the same as the original. EWWW: 830KB -- About the same as Smush thought it did, around 10% SiteGround SG Optimizer: 487KB -- quite a bit better! Imagify using its "ultra" setting: 196KB! -- not sure what they did here. The image was scaled down to 1600px, and it seemed a little "bleached out." But that's still a pretty hefty reduction! For reference, the popular Mac desktop tool, ImageOptim, with aggressive but non-destructive settings reduced the image to 397KB. Saving the image with Photoshop "High" quality setting ("60"): 487KB, about the same as SiteGround "Medium" quality setting ("30"): 293KB "Low" quality setting ("10"): 176KB! Bottom line: To answer your direct question, neither Smush or Ewww seem to give you much compression. Also SiteGround's image optimization (plus their webp conversion) adds real value. Imagify is capable very impressive (the resizing was probably an artifact of other settings in the plugin.) I'll just add that since I did my experiment a lot more plugins and hosting companies (and, theoretically, WordPress itself) have started supporting the WebP format. That can be very helpful since it's more efficient than JPEG in most cases. And since WebP supports transparent backgrounds it can be extremely more efficient than PNGs. So the first/best thing you can do is probably convert to WebP. If you've got that the tool you use to optimize your JPG and PNG files may not be as important. More on reddit.com