Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing Smush 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 Smush
Smush is the award-winning WordPress image compression plugin from WPMU DEV. It automatically compresses, resizes, and lazy loads images to improve site speed and boost your Google PageSpeed Insights score.
How External Images differs from Smush
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 Smush and External Images?
If you're fed up with plugin updates slowing down your site — and wondering whether Smush's developers ever test against stores with large catalogues — it might be time for a change. Every release of External Images is performance-tested against a one-million-product WooCommerce store to guarantee sub-second response times across every page. Migration is more straightforward than you might expect, and a free trial means you can evaluate the difference on your staging server with zero risk.
What do others say about External Images?
Purchased the external images plugin which was superb. Needed some bespoke work so it was compatible with a third party plugin and Dave was only to happy to help and in record time. Very happy.
I'm impressed. I wasn't sure I would be able to accomplish what I needed with my images. I'm hosting images on my site for SEO purposes. On product upload, I don't need WP to download those images and create multiple versions that a browser could serve (more images served = slower website load). Since I've optimized my images I want WordPress to use those images. With the external images plugin, I'm able to upload my images via FTP. Then I upload a reference to those images in the product upload file. Also, support is fantastic. My theme had a slight issue with external images. Dave personally looked into it and was able to quickly resolve the issue for me.
External Images allowed me to import products at 6x the speed! Great plugin as are Dave's other plugins, and fantastic support. He will make updates to the plugin within days to fix any issues you may run into. 5/5, highly recommend.
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 →
