ShortPixel Adaptive Images vs Scalability Pro

Dave Hilditch •

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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 site was fast when it was small. Now archive pages, imports and wp-admin screens are waiting on the database. Scalability Pro adds the indexes WordPress leaves out, stops it counting rows nobody reads, and defers the work that turns an import into an overnight job.

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?

★★★★★
Silver Pik — August 2022

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.

★★★★★
Alessandro Trotta — October 2022

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

★★★★★
Mihai Lapugean — November 2022

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.

What's new in Scalability Pro?

6.38.0 (30th October 2026)

  • *Alter main query to use EXISTS rather than LEFT JOIN* leaves pages Super Speedy Filters serves from its own index to Super Speedy Filters, so they no longer carry an extra product visibility check.

6.37.11 (30th October 2026)

  • Fixed database errors about missing `scalability_pro_post_count_cache` and `scalability_pro_transient_cache` tables after activating Scalability Pro with WP-CLI: activation creates the cache tables before anything uses them.

6.37.10 (29th October 2026)

  • Updated super-speedy-settings to 1.14.3: update downloads now send the licence key in a request header instead of the download URL.

6.37.9 (29th October 2026)

  • Fixed native WordPress search running slower with Scalability Pro's indexes installed on large stores: the `wpi_scalability_pro_sitemaps` index now leads with `post_type` and is rebuilt automatically after updating.

6.37.8 (29th October 2026)

  • Reworded the *Alter main query to use EXISTS rather than LEFT JOIN* description: it changes how the SQL is written, never which products are shown.
View full changelog →

Want faster results? Try Scalability Pro on your store.

Get Scalability Pro →

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