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:
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 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
- 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 →
