Using images on your WordPress blog is very intuitive, mainly because there are a ton of plugins that allow you to integrate them within your website. However, when you use a lot of images, you need to rely on your webhost to make sure that they are uploaded with speed on a consistent basis. For those of you who want another layer of protection from the slow load speed of images, you could invest on the services of an image hosting service. Read on to find out some of the advantages of doing so.
Free Up Storage Space
Depending on the plan that you have with your webhost there might only be a limited amount of storage space that you can use. Therefore, it makes sense to free up some of that space by hosting the images on an image hosting service. One hosting plugin that is very easy to use is called WordPress Neepic Plugin, which allows you to store images indefinitely. This is great for those of you who are searching for a long term solution.
Security Of Images
When using a third party service to store your images, it’s important that the security of the images is not going to be called into question. The plugin above claims that it can provide 99% security for any images that you store. The reason why such high levels of security are offered is due to the cloud technology that is being used to store them. Having images stored in the cloud allows for non-centralized storage. This means your images will not be stored in one location, but across many.
Quick Load Speeds
Nowadays, the worst thing that can happen to a website is for it to slow down to a snail’s pace as a result of too much traffic. By investing in an image hosting solution that does not include your webhost you can significantly increase the speed of your website. Since WordPress allows for the easy addition of images, as a webmaster, you can get carried away by adding a large number of images. This increases the page sizes by a significant amount, and therefore increases the amount of time it takes to load the page. But your website does not need to be penalized by slow load speeds simply for having a lot of pictures.
There are a few image hosting solutions out there, and to get an added level of security try using a couple of them to store your images. You could run a few tests by using several services, and then analyze the page load speeds. This data should tell you which image hosting solution is able to get you the best boost in speed.
Statistical Analysis
Some image hosting services will provide a range of statistics that you can use to analyze related data such as views, failed load attempts, load speeds and so on. It’s an added element that could prove to be helpful when managing your images. This is especially true if you have thousands of them on your website.
Steven Johnson, a WP Hosting Reviews senior editor, works from Atlanta and covers all things related to WordPress and Hosting.
He graduated from Georgia Tech in Chemical Engineering, has managed hosting companies and now builds WordPress and Joomla Websites for small to medium companies full time.
