How to Link External Images in WordPress.

What happens if your wordpress blog were bloated with images?

I was figuring out many ideas on how I can link external images into my wordpress to prevent my web hosting Hard Disk (HDD) space from becoming bloated. As you can see, my blog consists of many images which soon will bloat my HDD space very fast. I realized that my web hosting hard disk (HDD) space would get larger and larger soon and I will be craving for more HDD space to store my images. So here, is my new method to link all my external images to my box.com account. There are pros and cons to this method but let’s be positive and look at the advantages first.

Linking to external image

Pros:-

  • changing the image will immediately update your blog image.
  • save your blog hosting storage space. Uses less HDD storage space.
  • uses less local server resources.
  • smaller backup size for your wordpress hence faster in backing up your blog.
  • permanent image storage. Images still intact and re-usable even if your wordpress been compromised or infected by viruses.

Cons:-

  • may affect image loading, ensure external image hosting is up all the time.
  • still need to host your featured images locally.
  • accidentally deleting your external host image thus image is not shown in your blog.
  • doing double work as you need to upload to external host and also embedding the image into your wordpress.

If you are comfortable with linking your image externally, here are the steps, let’s begin (btw, these steps are for images hosted on box.com only).

  1. Login to your box.com account.
  2. create a new folder.
  3. copy your images in the folder.
  4. then click the share link and Embed Widget.
  1. set your settings.
  1. once setting done, copy the embed code. You can preview the embed else you can just copy and paste into your wordpress straight away.
  2. Below is a comparison image when insert directly from wordpress and link externally from my box.com.

Insert from wordpress media.

Insert from box.com as widget.