External WordPress Images plugin
Vincent Z. asked 8 years ago
Hi Dave,
This is a pre-sales question.
We have a website which has just gone live (last 2 weeks after migrating it to a new URL and rebuilding) it is slow and I have done my utmost to optimise the speed. However, it is still too slow for my liking.
I am using Datafeedr for the product sets and I wrote to Eric at Datafeedr who tried to help us optimise the speed with some recommendations including Wp Fastest Cache, and I have also installed Advanced DB Cleaner but still no joy. The hosting provider is very good and everything seems quite optimised there.
Which plugin of yours would work with this, we thought about External Wordpress Images, would this have any benefit at all? Is the fee a one of fee? DO images still display correctly and is there any lag to the images displaying?
Can you please advise?
Many thanks
Vincent
Dave Hilditch Staff answered 8 years ago
If your hosting is definitely good hosting (SSD, Nginx, PHP 7, MariaDB, Redis, Varnish?) then the two plugins that can help you the most are Scalability Pro and External Images .
Scalability Pro speeds up imports, speeds up your back end and speeds up your front-end shop and free text search. To make the most of the plugin you need to switch to using the replacement widgets that come with Scalability Pro instead of the WooCommerce native ones (or third party ones).
These widgets are designed to scale – this is the primary source of slow speeds on large affiliate sites.
The External Images plugin on the other hand – that avoids the need to import images. This will definitely speed up your imports since it massively reduces the disk writes occurring (WordPress typically makes 6 different sizes of an imported image – that’s a lot to write and compute).
It does have a knock on effet that the images for your site are loaded from the affiliate CDN. This is both good and bad. It’s good because more content can load simultaneously and your server is not having to bother to serve up the images. It’s bad because it slightly lowers your SEO performance not having your own images and of course you will have no control over the images – e.g. if you import to your server, you can get a CDN in front and guarantee performance.
Primarily it sounds like you need Scalability Pro. Ping me if you need help with it – there’s an upgrade due out imminently which improves the onboarding experience but it is fairly straightforward anyway.
