Imagify vs External Images Plugin
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing Imagify 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 Imagify
Imagify is a WordPress image compression and optimization plugin that automatically compresses images on upload, converts them to WebP or AVIF, and resizes images that exceed a set dimension — all with one click.
How External Images differs from Imagify
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 Imagify and External Images?
If Imagify has ever caused your site to slow down after an update, or if you have noticed performance degrading as your catalogue grows, External Images offers a genuinely different approach. Built on a SQL-first architecture and stress-tested against a one-million-product WooCommerce store on every release, it is designed to hold up as your store scales. Migration is simpler than most expect, and a free trial means you can validate the improvement on staging with no financial commitment.
What do others say about External Images?
Great plugin that saves a huge amount of diskspace on your server. And the support is great and impressively fast 🙂 Thank you very much 🙂
We recently implemented the use of external images across several hundred websites on our network and it has really helped our overall process from load times, disc space usage, etc. I have used almost all of superspeedys plugins and this one is amazing, just like all the others.
I had to import 500k posts in my website. As you can imagine that process takes time. I did some research and I found out that if I want to import posts with images that would have probably taken me 10 years to do so. After that I saw this plugin mentioned in a forum and gave it a try – my import was completed in less than 1-2 hours. Amazing plugin that solves a really bad problem! Thank you!
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 →
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