Deactivating Pixy

You may deactivate and reactivate Pixy for any reason, at any time, and you’d never be at risk for your original images. Same goes for the image links that have existed if you’ve used Pixy in Speed Mode and a third-party website has embedded the Pixy-rewritten link.

What happens when Pixy is deactivated

When you deactivate Pixy temporarily or permanently, your website will start showing the original unoptimized images directly from your media library.

Original images are shown instead of Pixy-optimized versions.
If you’ve optimized your images with Bulk Optimize, the optimized versions remain unused in your media library, next to the originals. They won’t be served to your visitors, because Pixy will clean up the web server rules it created upon activation, which will cause orginal images to be shown.
You will need to clear any page cache or proxy cache that you have running on your website after deactivation.

Before you deactivate Pixy

Always deactivate Pixy by visiting the Plugins section in your WordPress admin panel and clicking the deactivate button. This allows Pixy to clean up it’s database tables, as well as to send a deactivation signal to the Pixy API. The latter makes reactivation in the future instant and easy, but reactivation could fail if the plugin was removed manually. Before deactivation, make a choice regarding images that may have already be optimized via Bulk Optimize:

Keep the images already optimized via Bulk Optimize: Keeps stored ioptimized .avif and .webp images in the library. Upon reactivation of Pixy, serving optimized images without Speed Mode would be instant.
Delete optimized images: .avif and .webp versions will be deleted. A reactivation, unless you prefer Speed Mode, would require the re-optimization of the entire library before optimized images can be shown to your visitors.

Clear caches after deactivation

Clear any and every page cache that is running on your website.

What to expect after deactivation

Your website will show unoptimized images (the original images in your Media Library) to all of your visitors.

Re-activating Pixy later

If you’ve deactivated Pixy cleanly from your WordPress admin, you can reactivate Pixy instantly at any time.

What happens when Pixy is deactivated

When you deactivate Pixy temporarily or permanently, your website will start showing the original unoptimized images directly from your media library.

Original images are shown instead of Pixy-optimized versions.

If you’ve optimized your images with Bulk Optimize, the optimized versions remain unused in your media library, next to the originals. They won’t be served to your visitors, because Pixy will clean up the web server rules it created upon activation, which will cause orginal images to be shown.

You will need to clear any page cache or proxy cache that you have running on your website after deactivation.

Before you deactivate Pixy

Keep the images already optimized via Bulk Optimize: Keeps stored ioptimized .avif and .webp images in the library. Upon reactivation of Pixy, serving optimized images without Speed Mode would be instant.

Delete optimized images: .avif and .webp versions will be deleted. A reactivation, unless you prefer Speed Mode, would require the re-optimization of the entire library before optimized images can be shown to your visitors.