The Houzez theme is a popular property/real-estate theme for real-estate agencies. The high-res images, the number of them, and the number of properties makes uploading and storing all of these images very slow and expensive. External Images can help with that by eliminating the need to upload images at all – instead you can have them linked from your data source provider’s CDN.

Overall, External Images works great with the Houzez theme and will massively speed up your imports as well as lower or eliminate your storage costs. However, there is one potential issue you may experience, depending on your display options configured in the Houzez theme.

Featured Image not displaying

If you experience this, it’s likely because the source image URLs include ) brackets in the URL. The Houzez theme doesn’t wrap the image URLs with quotes, so having brackets in the URL breaks the CSS you see in the image below:

Note that this only affects Houzez display options v1 and v6. If you do not wish to edit your Houzez code, simply choose v3, v4, or v5 display option in Houzez configuration and the featured images will work immediately for those display options, no code editing required.

If you need v1, v2 or v6, you’ll need to edit the themes/houzez/property-details/partials/media-tabs.php to include these single quotes – see the image above.

After upgrading the Houzez Theme to version 2.5.2, property details v3, v3, and v5 don’t display the featured image.

Change line 62 in this file: /wp-content/themes/houzez/property-details/partials/media-tabs.php