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Using too much bandwidth?
Most web hosts have fairly low limits on how much bandwidth you can use, and if you’re selling digital downloads, you can use it up especially fast.
That’s an excellent reason to offload your media files to a cloud service like Amazon S3, and these WooCommerce plugins can help.
Using one of these plugins, you can:
- Sync your entire Media Library with Amazon S3
- Serve all of your digital downloads from S3
- Use S3 for all of your product images & videos
- Delete media from your site after it’s synced to S3
Once your plugin of choice is set up, you’ll use a lot less bandwidth and storage space with your WordPress host, which should save you money every month.
Let’s look at the plugins now.
Amazon S3 storage plugins
Each of the plugins below is capable of transferring (or syncing) your Media Library items with Amazon S3. They all have unique features on top of this basic functionality, so make sure to review each one carefully.
Here are my top picks for the best Amazon S3 WooCommerce plugins.
1. YITH Amazon S3 Storage
Plugin Description
YITH Amazon S3 Storage is a well-designed plugin for offloading your images, video, and other media to Amazon’s S3 web service. The way it works is simple.
From the new settings menu added by this plugin, you can choose from a few configuration options. The first critical option is whether or not you want to copy uploaded files to your S3 storage bucket. With this option enabled, you can continue uploading images normally on your site and they’ll also end up on Amazon’s servers.
Another handy option is the ability to replace your media URLs with the URLs on Amazon’s servers. For instance, when someone views one of your products, all of the product images will be loaded from S3 instead of your website. This can make them load much faster and reduce the bandwidth used by your server.
One other extremely useful option is that you can automatically delete images uploaded to the Media Library. If you choose this option, you can continue using the Media Library to upload your images and they’ll be copied to your S3 bucket and then deleted from your site. It can make image management a bit confusing when editing products, but it will allow you to greatly reduce how much storage you use on your hosting plan.
Overall, YITH Amazon S3 Storage is a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution for anyone looking to offload their WooCommerce site’s media to a cloud service.
2. Leopard - WordPress Offload Media
Plugin Description
Leopard is an awesome plugin for offloading items in your Media Library to a cloud storage solution like Amazon S3, and it works wonderfully with eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads.
With this plugin, you can choose between Amazon S3, Wasabi, Google Cloud Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces, and Bunny CDN to offload your media. Then enter your API keys and you can configure your bucket settings.
What’s nice about this plugin is that it gives you a ton of control over how your media items are handled. You can copy them to Amazon S3 upon uploading, automatically delete them from your server, add expiration limits to URLs (for product downloads), and even choose specific file types to sync.
Like other plugins listed here, the main draw is that both your images and digital downloads can be served from S3, which will reduce the bandwidth used on your server and speed up download times for customers.
If you’re looking for a robust cloud storage plugin that can handle all of your media items including your digital downloads, this may be the best plugin for your site.
3. Amazon S3 Storage
Plugin Description
The Amazon S3 Storage plugin is much simpler than the others and has one specific use case: serving digital files.
If you sell digital products from your site, you’ll know that each product needs a URL pointing to where it’s hosted in your Media Library. However, this can be insecure and it’s not optimized well for delivering large downloads to customers, especially if you have many customers downloading concurrently. That’s where Amazon comes in.
This plugin allows you to enter a shortcode into the file URL that specifies where it’s located in your S3 bucket. The benefit is that you won’t have to fill up your Media Library will all your downloads, and the download process will be lightning-fast for your customers.
If you want an optimized way to deliver downloadable digital files to your customers, this plugin is definitely worth a try.
Which Amazon S3 plugin is best?
If you’re not sure which plugin to choose for your WooCommerce store, here are a few final thoughts.
YITH Amazon S3 Storage is the most comprehensive plugin for integrating a WordPress site with Amazon S3. It also has a fairly simple configuration menu that is easy to learn.
Leopard has a lot of interesting features and is also capable of integrating with different cloud services, so check it out if you’re not sold on using S3 already. Leopard – WordPress Offload Media.
Thanks so much for checking out this collection of the best Amazon S3 WooCommerce plugins. Please share it using the buttons below if it helped you find a great new plugin.
