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Using external services for media and documents on your WordPress site

In this article, we’ll see how you can manage and share your media and documents simply and securely using external services.

This technique is particularly used by photographers' sites, and company sites, as well as by sites/blogs with a lot of content.

We’re going to suggest a certain number of services that you can use, but first of all, we’d like to remind you of two important security points in order to avoid problems in the future such as hacking your accounts on one of these services and the theft of your media and documents by proposing you reread the following article : Important security reminders.

Why use an external service ?

The use of an external service offers several advantages :

  1. You can centralise all your documents and media in one place, in a secure manner.
  2. This can reduce the load on your WordPress site, so you won't use as much disk space, allowing you to have a lighter WordPress that’s easier to clone and restore in case of problems.
  3. Your site can be faster because only WordPress resources will be uploaded to our servers; media and other documents will load from the external server.
  4. You can easily share files with colleagues or customers via a URL.

What services do you recommend ?

There are many services that offer file storage and sharing, at different prices and with different options. You most likely already use some at the moment, so the choice will surely be the one or ones you know and are used to using. Here are the best-known :

  • Dropbox - Free and paid offers.
  • OneDrive - Free and paid offers.
  • Google Drive - Free and paid offers.
  • Amazon S3 - Fee, starting at $0.024/GB/month, which is $2.4/month if you use 100GB.

 

How to use them with WordPress

To use these services easily with WordPress, here are some plugins you can install :

External Media

Google Drive WP Media

Microsoft Azure Storage for WordPress

WP Offload Media Lite for Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, and Google Cloud Storage

 

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