Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing Statically 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 Statically
Statically is a free CDN service and WordPress plugin that delivers static assets — images, CSS, and JavaScript — from a global edge network. It works by rewriting URLs to route assets through Statically's CDN nodes, with additional options for image resizing and WebP conversion via URL parameters.
How External Images differs from Statically
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.
Statically accelerates the delivery of images that are already hosted on your server by routing them through a CDN proxy. External Images takes a fundamentally different approach — it does not host or proxy images at all, but instead stores external image URLs so that WooCommerce references images at their original source without any file ever being stored or served by your server.
How to choose between Statically and External Images?
Statically speeds up delivery of images you already host. External Images eliminates the need to host product images on your server altogether — a fundamentally different model suited to stores importing products from external sources. SQL-first architecture, tested against one-million products, free trial available.
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 →
