Smush vs External Images Plugin
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:
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 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
- 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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