Documentation

Quick Start Guide

Last updated April 11, 2022

Introduction

WP Offload Media copies files from your WordPress Media Library to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Google Cloud Storage and rewrites URLs to serve the files from S3, DigitalOcean Spaces, Google Cloud Storage, CloudFront, or another CDN. And with the Assets addon, it can identify assets (CSS, JS, images, etc) used by your site and serve them from CloudFront or another CDN.

Configure Cloud Storage

To quickly get started with your preferred cloud storage provider, please follow the appropriate guide from the following list.

Each guide will walk you through the setup required in the cloud storage provider’s account to obtain Authentication Credentials, the steps to configure WP Offload Media to offload your Media Library, and finally the (optional but recommended) steps to configuring a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Questions?

Each of the above quick start guides should help you with getting started with WP Offload Media but if you run into any issues, you can search these docs via the search bar above.

If you’re not able to find what you need in the docs, you can always contact our team via the Help tab in the plugin.

Next Steps: Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Now that your media is offloaded to Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Google Cloud Storage, your next step if you’re concerned about performance (i.e. load time and SEO), is to configure a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

By default WP Offload Media is configured to use raw bucket URLs when serving offloaded media. Your media URLs might look something like this example from Amazon S3:

http://wicked-awesome-bucket-name.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/…

Not only is this an ugly URL, but this URL is also bad for SEO as Google likes to see your media on your own domain. Also, cloud storage is primarily a storage platform and is not optimized for high speed delivery of media. Faster media is obviously better for user experience but also better for SEO. For these reasons, we strongly recommend configuring CloudFront or another CDN for delivering your media. For more details about the benefits of CloudFront and other CDNs, please read our Why Use a CDN? doc.

If you are using Amazon S3 as your cloud storage provider we have a guide for setting up CloudFront as your CDN. It gets you up and running with CloudFront properly configured to use your Amazon S3 bucket as its origin, and shows how to update WP Offload Media’s settings to use it.

If you don’t want to use CloudFront for your CDN, you can also use any other CDN. We have a guide for setting up Cloudflare as well as StackPath.

For DigitalOcean Spaces we also have two guides; DigitalOcean Spaces CDN Setup helps with setting up DigitalOcean’s built in CDN for Spaces, and How to Set Up a Custom Domain for DigitalOcean Spaces with KeyCDN is useful if you would like to use a custom domain via a third party CDN.

We also have a guide for How to Set Up a Custom Domain CDN for Google Cloud Storage.