ShortPixel vs External Images Plugin
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing ShortPixel Adaptive Images with External Images? 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 service that automatically resizes, optimizes, and delivers your images in the best format (WebP or AVIF) for each visitor's browser, served from ShortPixel's global CDN network.
Visit ShortPixel Adaptive Images →
How External Images differs from ShortPixel Adaptive Images
All plugins from Super Speedy Plugins share a SQL-first architecture and an uncompromising focus on performance — and External Images is no different. Here is what sets it apart:
If a supplier, merchant or CDN already hosts your images, downloading copies into WordPress wastes import time, CPU and disk. External Images lets WooCommerce use those remote URLs without creating local attachments or thumbnails.
How to choose between ShortPixel Adaptive Images and External Images?
The honest question to ask is: does ShortPixel Adaptive Images's development team regularly benchmark their plugin against stores with hundreds of thousands of products? For External Images, that answer is unambiguous — performance testing against a one-million-product store is part of every single release cycle, not an afterthought. If consistent, predictable speed matters to your business, that is a meaningful difference. A free trial is available to test it risk-free on your staging environment.
What do others say about External Images?
Bought external images and scalability pro. 5 stars for both of them. Thank you for these superb plugins which really boosted my website speed and product imports.
I love how fucking fast External Images when I import a lot image without need the CDN server.
Hi, For Woocommerce to have multiple image links, so that multiple images can be shown, will the plugin accommodate? Also do you have any suggestions for any services that allow to upload product images along with a metadata like the SKU, which we can export to a csv/spreadsheet time to time to get the matching image URLs for a product SKU?
External Images Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →- External Images demo with Houzez Theme
- External Images demo with RealHomesPro Theme
- External Images demo with WPResidence theme
- Compatibility and Integrations
- Houzez Theme Gallery Display Options
- Photon image resizing
- The SSL Image Proxy
- WooCommerce Advanced Bulk Edit Compatibility
- WooCommerce Variation and Gallery Images
- Adding external images to posts or custom post types
- Changing external images for WooCommerce products manually
- Datafeedr Integration
- Guide to third party storage
- How to alter import jobs to import external images
- How to Delete All External Images from Your Database
- Installation & Activation
Articles about External Images
View all articles →- December Development Update
- More speed, more updates, and a bit of a roadmap for our plugins
- More beta updates available
- Dev Diary #7
- Dev Diary #6
- Dev Diary #4
- Dev Diary #2
- External Images 1.97 released
- External Images upgrade released – gallery support added
- External Images upgrade released
What's new in External Images?
3.43.11 (20th October 2026)
- Faster first page views of products sharing images, because unchanged image attachment details are no longer rewritten
3.43.10 (20th October 2026)
- Fixed first page views of products that share an image with other products being slow behind nginx-helper and other cache purgers, because unchanged image attachments are no longer re-saved
- Tested up to WordPress 7.1
3.43.9 (22nd August 2026)
- Updated super-speedy-settings to the latest version
3.43.8 (21st August 2026)
- Hardened the shared settings module and removed its Jetpack Autoloader dependency
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →
Comments