External Images
Keep your images off your server - on a CDN, S3, anywhere
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.
Stop importing image files you do not need to own.
If a supplier, merchant or CDN already hosts the images, External Images lets WordPress and WooCommerce use those URLs without downloading files or generating a stack of local thumbnails.
How an external image becomes a WordPress image
Watch the direct-image workflow
This walkthrough shows the plugin using remote image URLs in WordPress and WooCommerce. The interface may have changed since it was recorded, but the direct-image model is the same.
“I’m impressed. I host images for SEO and don’t want WordPress downloading copies. With this plugin I upload references to my own images — and support is fantastic; Dave personally resolved a theme issue for me.”
“Excellent, and does exactly what it says. Our images already live on their own servers, so it makes sense to use them from there — now I don’t worry about hosting file limits and can just add more products.”
Invest in Speed
Yearly plans include a year of updates and support and the plugin keeps working afterwards – renew at 30% off. Upgrade to a lifetime plan within 60 days and just pay the difference. Backed by our 60-day money-back guarantee.
1 Site
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 1 Site License
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
5 Sites
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 5 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
25 Sites
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 25 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
5 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 5 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
25 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 25 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
250 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 250 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 2 support seats – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
Start with the plan you need today.
If you need more sites later, move up without buying the plugin twice.
to try it properly
Ask for a full refund within 60 days of purchase, for any reason.
Upgrade and pay the difference
Within 60 days, your original payment counts in full towards a larger plan, including lifetime.
Example based on our €79 yearly and €279 lifetime plans.
Upgrading later? You still get credit after 60 days, though the credit reduces over time on yearly plans.
How do yearly renewals work?
A yearly licence includes one year of updates and support. The plugin keeps working after that. Renewal for further updates and support is optional. Renew before or within one month after expiry for 30% off, within six months for 20% off, or later for 10% off. Full terms
Agency or hosting company? Get in touch for custom pricing
Spend import time and disk space on the catalogue, not duplicate images
- Skip downloads during imports. A remote URL replaces the download, attachment and thumbnail work normally repeated for every product image.
- Avoid Media Library growth. Direct external images are post meta, not attachment rows or files in
uploads. - Keep product image behaviour. Featured images, galleries, variation images, variation galleries, lightboxes and the hover magnifier have dedicated handling.
- Use supplier feeds without rewriting them. Accept featured, merchant and gallery URL fields, including pipe- or comma-separated gallery lists.
- Keep HTTPS pages secure. Upgrade an HTTP source to HTTPS where the host supports it, or proxy the image where it does not.
- Choose delivery deliberately. Serve from the original host, use Jetpack Photon for resizing, or enable Proxy All Images for a local file cache.
- Keep social product images present. External URLs are added to Open Graph tags and WooCommerce product structured data.
External forever or local later?
External Images keeps the image external during normal direct delivery. Use it when the supplier or CDN should remain the source of truth. Delayed Image Import is a different workflow: publish the catalogue first, then download images into the Media Library later. Choose that when you ultimately need local attachments, responsive-image metadata or independence from the source host.
Check the fit before you buy
External Images is a good fit when
- A supplier, affiliate network or CDN already hosts the product or listing images.
- Downloading images and generating thumbnails dominates a large import.
- Disk quotas or Media Library size are limiting catalogue growth.
- Your theme or integration can work through standard WordPress image filters rather than requiring a real attachment ID.
Trade-offs to understand
- The source host remains part of your page delivery. Its downtime, hotlink protection, rate limits and CORS policy are outside your control unless you enable local proxy caching.
- There is no real attachment ID. Plugins that insist on a Media Library record may not see the image, even though common WordPress and WooCommerce filters are covered.
- Direct external images do not emit WordPress
srcsetor native lazy-loading attributes. They are not locally generated attachment variants. - Proxy All Images changes the storage model. It writes a local cache under
uploads/external-images; there is currently no automatic size ceiling or eviction. - Proxy caching accepts PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF and SVG. WebP and AVIF are served directly and are not added to the local proxy cache.
- Outbound HTTP is needed for HTTPS probing and proxy caching. Direct rendering still works when the visitor’s browser can reach the source.
External Images Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →What's new in External Images?
View full changelog →- Faster first page views of products sharing images, because unchanged image attachment details are no longer rewritten
- 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
- Updated super-speedy-settings to the latest version
- Hardened the shared settings module and removed its Jetpack Autoloader dependency
- Updated
super-speedy-settingsto 1.8.0, restoring the official WordPress MCP Adapter
Frequently asked questions
Works well with
Some combinations get a bigger discount than others. Add this set to your basket to see its price.
26 reviews for External Images
Invest in Speed
Yearly plans include a year of updates and support and the plugin keeps working afterwards – renew at 30% off. Upgrade to a lifetime plan within 60 days and just pay the difference. Backed by our 60-day money-back guarantee.
1 Site
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 1 Site License
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
5 Sites
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 5 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
25 Sites
- Yearly licence – 1 year of updates and support, keeps working afterwards
- 25 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
5 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 5 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
25 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 25 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 1 support seat – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
250 Sites
- Lifetime licence – updates and support for life
- 250 Site Licenses
- Unlimited external images, nothing downloaded
- Galleries, variations & every post type
- 2 support seats – chat live with our engineers on Discord
- Priority support
Start with the plan you need today.
If you need more sites later, move up without buying the plugin twice.
to try it properly
Ask for a full refund within 60 days of purchase, for any reason.
Upgrade and pay the difference
Within 60 days, your original payment counts in full towards a larger plan, including lifetime.
Example based on our €79 yearly and €279 lifetime plans.
Upgrading later? You still get credit after 60 days, though the credit reduces over time on yearly plans.
How do yearly renewals work?
A yearly licence includes one year of updates and support. The plugin keeps working after that. Renewal for further updates and support is optional. Renew before or within one month after expiry for 30% off, within six months for 20% off, or later for 10% off. Full terms
Agency or hosting company? Get in touch for custom pricing
Sebastian B. (verified owner) –
Great plugin haven been using this in combination with a Jet Engine CPT and creating new posts with the cpt API end-point. no hassle solution to get your cpt to use external images for featured image and gallery simmply post like this in you API post body
“external_image_url”: “https://image1.jpg|https://image2.jpg|https://image3.jpg”
Zlati Z. –
I had to import 500k posts in my website. As you can imagine that process takes time. I did some research and I found out that if I want to import posts with images that would have probably taken me 10 years to do so. After that I saw this plugin mentioned in a forum and gave it a try – my import was completed in less than 1-2 hours. Amazing plugin that solves a really bad problem! Thank you!
Adam N. (verified owner) –
We recently implemented the use of external images across several hundred websites on our network and it has really helped our overall process from load times, disc space usage, etc. I have used almost all of superspeedys plugins and this one is amazing, just like all the others.
Glyn S. (verified owner) –
That’s great news. Thank you!
Thomas P. –
Great plugin that saves a huge amount of diskspace on your server. And the support is great and impressively fast 🙂
Thank you very much 🙂
Jimmi N. (verified owner) –
The product runs smoothly, although I had to tweak it slightly to accommodate my specific requirement of appending query parameters to images. The code is both well-structured and easy to navigate.
That said, there seems to be a shortfall in the customer support department. I’ve posted a question in the FAQ that has yet to be addressed, and I’ve observed that I’m not the only one facing such communication challenges.
Previously, when I purchased another one of your plugins, I reported a bug but received no response.
I see a lot of promise in what you’re offering and understand that juggling all aspects of a business is no small feat. This is why I suggest hiring a dedicated customer support specialist to solely focus on addressing customer concerns. I believe this would be a valuable addition to your business. However, the decision is ultimately yours.
Best regards
Jimmi Nielsen
Dasar G. (verified owner) –
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.
Mark (verified owner) –
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.
MARCUS F. (verified owner) –
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.
Dave H. –
Thank you, glad to be able to help and very happy that everyone is happy with our Discord server for support 🙂
Gary C (verified owner) –
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!
Joseph Miller (verified owner) –
F&cK*&^ Amazing Plugin no joke. Not stressed about cropping and compressing anything. Thanks guys.
Joseph Miller (verified owner) –
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.
Daniel A. (verified owner) –
My site breathed after using this plugin with the server, because it allows you to import products through product import plugins without downloading photos / images to the server. And it also gives the possibility to add a thumbnail to the product or the entire gallery through links to external images, and thus, if we have, for example, several pages, we can use one image on many pages. Without this plugin, we would have to add the same image on each of our wordpress pages. Useful plug.
Fabio (verified owner) –
For big blog it’s a must have in order to increase speed page and reduce hosting disk space
Kerstin K. (verified owner) –
I wait now over 1 Month for support. Nothing works, no support.
Please give me a refund.
Dave H. –
Sorry for your poor experience, August had me pulled in all directions.
Stuart J. (verified owner) –
Thanks, this plugin is excellent and does exactly what it says!
Our webhosting provider is one of those that offers ‘unlimited’ storage space, but in very tiny print states that there is a ‘technical’ limit on the number of files you can have in your account.
We use multi-channel listing software, and all our images are already uploaded to their own image servers, so it makes sense to use the images from there rather than have them uploaded to our website hosting as well.
Now with this plugin, I don’t need to worry about finding a new hosting provider or file storage limits, and concentrate instead on adding even more products to our Woo Shop.
Dave H. –
Thank you for your review and I’m glad to hear about another area where this plugin is popular. I hope you find the recent updates useful too – we added variation images and variation galleries as well as image preview in the admin area and better compatibility with theme magnifying glasses etc.
nokivcon –
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?
Dave H. –
The current live version allows featured images and gallery images.
The current beta version has above (improved editor) as well as variation images.
I’m working on adding variation gallery images too into beta.
re: SKU, WooCommerce has a field you can set for SKU. A good import tool is WP All Import.
kasa k. –
I love how fucking fast External Images when I import a lot image without need the CDN server.
Dave H. –
Thanks! That’s the primary reason I built it. That and the ability to have millions of products in your affiliate store without the need for massive amounts of storage space.
Markus P. (verified owner) –
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.
savvas z. (verified owner) –
I was looking to make my wordpress site faster. I ended buying/using scalability pro. Excellent product, amazing performance for my site. After importing thousands of products my server lagged due to the enormous amount of images that i imported. External images to the rescue!!!! With the external images i keep my server clean and my site super fast!!! No more unnecessary thumbnails.
By the way support from Dave is first class!! Top notch developer!! Top notch support!
Highly recommended plugin!!! AAA
Thanks Dave for the awesome plugins and support!!!!
Ida Nielsen –
Some time ago I bought this plugin and it always worked smoothly. Recently there were some WordPress updates and my website broke (probably because of the Gutenberg editor addition).
I contacted the support/developer (Dave) and in few days my problem was completely solved! The plugin is now even better than before and I’m sure it will keep improving.
To sum up, I definitely recommend this External Images plugin, by far the best in the market!
Dave H. –
Hi – thank you for your kind comments, and thank you for your help improving the plugin 🙂
Digital D. (verified owner) –
Unfortunately this plugin doesn’t work on my websites. I have asked for the refund and I’m waiting, but nobody is answering.
Dave H. –
Hi – sorry for the delay – there’s an upgrade out today which should fix any issues you are experiencing.
I’m now working on documentation for External Images for the rare themes that do not use the correct functions to grab thumbnails etc – even with these themes, External Images will work but with those it will take a little modification to your child theme.
Berkay K. (verified owner) –
Since HTTPS became standart I was having trouble compiling with https rules on my woocommerce site, since my images are hosted on a non-https server. With External images my non-https images become https via proxy on my server.
Altough it did not work immediately as I install it due to a problem on my word press theme, great support from Dave and his team kicked in and solved the problem on the theme.
Great Plugin, Great Team, Great Support…
Many thanks!
ming ming s. (verified owner) –
I’ve been looking for this kind of plugin to speed up my web for months . I have to admit It bothered me for a long time. And it’s so wired I didn’t find any one (no matter a free or paid one) until I watched the video of this plugin “external images” on youtube. At first, I thought this might be a plugin like others just supporting embedding pictures, not storing on remote vps. After watched the video, I knew this is the one I’ve been looking for. Now I can store all the pictures (thousands) on amazon s3 for my website, and don’t need to worry about the loading speed of my website. This is the best plugin ever!
Erik D. (verified owner) –
I both save space and got better speed on my site.
My friend is on shared host and for him it did a big difference.
Works out of the box and no hassel with setup.
This plugin it great.
Luigi N. (verified owner) –
Super plugin with an impressive support. Thank you!
Lali O. (verified owner) –
Thank you for this plugin, it is really very necessary plugin! No images on my hosting! I am really happy! I have store with more than 1 000 000 goods, and I do not need Big space disk for images.