DigitalOcean Spaces vs External Images Plugin
Want faster results? Try External Images on your store.
Get External Images →Comparing DigitalOcean Spaces 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 DigitalOcean Spaces
DigitalOcean Spaces is an S3-compatible object storage service with a built-in CDN. It integrates with WordPress via the same offload plugin ecosystem as Amazon S3 and offers predictable flat-rate pricing, making it a popular choice for developers already on DigitalOcean infrastructure.
How External Images differs from DigitalOcean Spaces
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
DigitalOcean Spaces offloads your media files to DO's object storage — which still requires uploading each image, managing the storage, and paying per gigabyte stored and transferred. External Images avoids the upload step entirely by storing external image URLs instead of hosting files anywhere, making it a better fit for product catalogues built from supplier or affiliate image sources that already have their own hosting.
How to choose between DigitalOcean Spaces and External Images?
DigitalOcean Spaces is a clean object storage option, but if your product images already live at external URLs, External Images eliminates the upload overhead and storage costs entirely. SQL-first, tested against one-million products, free trial available.
What do others say about External Images?
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.
Great plugin that saves a huge amount of diskspace on your server. And the support is great and impressively fast 🙂 Thank you very much 🙂
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.
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 →