Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing WP Offload Media 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 WP Offload Media
WP Offload Media automatically copies your WordPress media library uploads to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, or Google Cloud Storage and serves them from there, keeping your WordPress server lean and fast.
How External Images differs from WP Offload Media
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 WP Offload Media and External Images?
If WP Offload Media 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?
No joke I initially got this plugin so I could experiment with scaling Woocomerce. Fell in love with it. I have roughly 2100 products In my current project. I have the archive set to 16 products per page. On any given archive page total sizes less then 400 kb. It's wild you would never be able to tell the images were not your own. Instantly load. Hats off to the team. Seriously doubt I will ever start another project with out incorporating it.
F&cK*&^ Amazing Plugin no joke. Not stressed about cropping and compressing anything. Thanks guys.
I have been looking a very long time for a plugin that does what this plugin does! Amazing support and answers to my questions. 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
- 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
External Images compared versus other products
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 →
