Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing Cloudinary 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 Cloudinary
The Cloudinary WordPress plugin lets you store, manage, transform, and deliver your images and videos from Cloudinary's media management platform, with automatic format conversion and global CDN delivery built in.
How External Images differs from Cloudinary
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:
Store images anywhere and serve them up through your WordPress website.
External Images lets you use images hosted anywhere and eliminates the heavy load of image download and resizing that would otherwise happen on product imports/creation.
This reduces CPU and storage requirements on your website allowing you to grow to whatever size you wish.
No limit on any plans for how many images you can handle.
How to choose between Cloudinary and External Images?
Choosing between Cloudinary and External Images comes down to how seriously performance at scale matters to your business. External Images was built from the ground up with a SQL-first architecture, and every release is benchmarked against a one-million-product WooCommerce store before it ships — the kind of rigorous testing that surfaces the performance issues other plugins quietly ignore. A free trial is available so you can see the difference on your own staging environment before committing.
What do others say about External Images?
For big blog it's a must have in order to increase speed page and reduce hosting disk space
My site breathed after using this plugin with the server, because it allows you to import products through product import plugins without downloading photos / images to the server. And it also gives the possibility to add a thumbnail to the product or the entire gallery through links to external images, and thus, if we have, for example, several pages, we can use one image on many pages. Without this plugin, we would have to add the same image on each of our wordpress pages. Useful plug.
No joke I initially got this plugin so I could experiment with scaling Woocomerce. Fell in love with it. I have roughly 2100 products In my current project. I have the archive set to 16 products per page. On any given archive page total sizes less then 400 kb. It's wild you would never be able to tell the images were not your own. Instantly load. Hats off to the team. Seriously doubt I will ever start another project with out incorporating it.
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
- Does External Images work with the WooCommerce REST API?
- For specific themes, widgets or shortcodes, External Images are not being displayed
- How do external images appear to Google, Twitter, Facebook etc?
- How do I fix gallery images on product detail pages?
- How do I make the images on archive pages fill the full containing box?
- How do I remove the extra placeholder added by my theme on the archive pages?
- How to force non-SSL images to be converted to SSL (HTTPS)
- Is my theme compatible with External 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
- Installation & Activation
- Cloudflare is caching posts/products without images when imported using WP All Import
- Featured Image broken with the Houzez theme
- How to fix weird image sizes
- I have a blank image at the end of my gallery, how do I fix this?
- Long External Image URLs save but do not appear in Media and so do not have captions, alt text or title text
- Thumbnails not appearing on property detail or product detail page
- When I rerun an import with updated image urls or image texts, the images or texts do not change
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?
3.33 (18th November 2025)
- Added full namespacing for plugin update checker to prevent conflicts with 3rd party plugins
3.32 (27th May 2025)
- Removed code for checking for and deleting orphans – this can be handled through a KB article instead as it's a one-off job to clean up data
3.31 (19th May 2025)
- Further improvements for image galleries, variation galleries and all ways of saving, updating or importing images to prevent duplicate entries in database
3.30 (15th May 2025)
- Hotfix to remove some debug I'd added
3.29 (15th May 2025)
- Speed boost for image retrieval
- Improvement for image galleries to prevent duplicate DB attachment entries being created
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →
