Can't seem to get a reply from WP Instense!
Aldrin H. asked 3 years ago
I purchased the external images plugin and works great. My first question is if there is anyway the external image URL's can be cached which, but to my logic it doesn't make sense and isn't possible. Maybe I'm wrong. My second question is, when I do inspect element on the img src of the external images, it displays a redirect link, for example https://mydomain/848848 . Am I seeing this correctly which I am pretty happy with it, since I don't want the search engines to see I'm hotlinking all these product images?
My final question is, will Scalability Pro improve my front end performance in loading the images quicker?
Crazy, I'm trying to buy the plugin but no one answers back.
Thank you
Dave Hilditch Staff answered 3 years ago
If you’re seeing a redirect link then something else is creating that.
With external images, it will display the direct image URL unless you choose the proxy option to proxy the images through your server. The proxied images would have a URL on your server and what happens is that the image is downloaded from the remote location temporarily and displayed through your server.
This is normally useful for insecure third party images (http rather than https) but you could also use it for your purpose, otherwise a link cloaking plugin could help you here which is what I think you’re seeing somewhere.
Edit: As for caching the images – this is not really possible – they will be cached by your users browser, but since you are using a third party image URL it won’t get cached on your server unless you proxy the images.
