Cloudinary vs External Images Plugin
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing Cloudinary 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 Cloudinary
The Cloudinary WordPress plugin lets you store, manage, transform, and deliver your images and videos from Cloudinary's media management platform, with automatic format conversion and global CDN delivery built in.
How External Images differs from Cloudinary
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 your images anywhere – a CDN, Amazon S3, a Digital Ocean space or your affiliate feed – and serve them straight through WordPress. Nothing gets downloaded to your server, so imports run faster and your disk stops filling up. Works with any post type and every WooCommerce product type, including variations and galleries.
Rated 4.65 out of 5 across 26 reviews.
- Import products without WordPress downloading or resizing a single image
- Scale to millions of products on low-cost hosting, with no image storage to worry about
- Works with WP All Import, Datafeedr and any tool that can set a custom field
- Cut disk usage and the CPU normally spent generating 20+ thumbnail sizes per image
How to choose between Cloudinary and External Images?
Choosing between Cloudinary and External Images comes down to how seriously performance at scale matters to your business. External Images was built from the ground up with a SQL-first architecture, and every release is benchmarked against a one-million-product WooCommerce store before it ships — the kind of rigorous testing that surfaces the performance issues other plugins quietly ignore. A free trial is available so you can see the difference on your own staging environment before committing.
What do others say about External Images?
For big blog it's a must have in order to increase speed page and reduce hosting disk space
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.
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.
External Images Knowledge Base
View full Knowledge Base →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?
3.35 (26th May 2026)
- Added new postmeta filter to add front-end gallery compatibility to latest Houzez theme – they no longer use metabox for their metadata
3.34 (20th May 2026)
- Updated the Super Speedy Settings page: added a "Recheck Licenses" button above the licence table so customers have a clear way to refresh licence status after a renewal or upgrade without scrolling down to the licence-key field. The button is disabled until a licence key is entered/saved and re-enables as you type.
- The Recheck flow now also force-bypasses the auth-server's own 1-hour licence cache (via a `force=1` flag on the `wpiapi/check_product_key` call), so renewals/upgrades that completed less than an hour before a recheck no longer show as expired/exceeded. Normal admin page loads continue to use both caches as before — only an explicit Recheck click bypasses them. (Lives in the `super-speedy-settings` submodule, so the change propagates to every Super Speedy plugin.)
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
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →