When it comes to WordPress, we usually regard it as the most popular content management system. According to statistics, WordPress has impressive monthly visitors of more than 400 million. Above all storage services, Amazon S3 stands out as a useful and trustworthy savior for WordPress.
It simply provides storage and protection to nearly all types of files you need. A compatible WordPress S3 plugin will help you upload, manage, and back up files.
In this article, we have carefully selected 5 WordPress S3 plugins to assist in integrating 2 gigantic platforms. Let’s dive in.
- What is Amazon S3?
- #1 Amazon S3 – Wasabi Smart File Uploads
- #2 PDA Amazon S3 WordPress Uploads
- #3 UpdraftPlus
- #4 Smush
- #5 EWWW Image Optimizer
- How to Upload Files from WordPress to Amazon S3 Bucket
What is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3, is a service that provides file storage, file security, and site performance. Individuals or corporations can have their data stored and protected for data analytics, websites, applications backup, restoration, and archive.
With Amazon S3, you can organize, configure, and optimize access to your data to suit your specific business requirements.
Amazon S3 earns the love of millions of users due to its benefits and capabilities. These are the reasons why we should integrate Amazon S3:
- Provide improved storage capacity: S3 gives you the ability to create, name, and put your data in a bucket. With the bucket, you are able to store up to an impressive 5TB of data amount.
- Decrease server load: With cloud storage, you do not have to worry about the loading time. Uploading everything to the cloud helps reduce the response time and boost the experience of both your SEO performance and users.
- Cost less: Since the host charges extra if you exceed the storage limit, the more economical S3 storage is worth considering.
- Protect data: Amazon S3 authorizes you to set file upload and download permission anywhere and at any time. It also helps you easily prevent people from illegally accessing your data.
- Offer convenience: By moving PHP files to the cloud, you can export and import your whole website with ease.
Top 5 Plugins to Cross-link WordPress and Amazon S3
#1 Amazon S3 – Wasabi Smart File Uploads
Wasabi Smart File Uploads appears as a powerful plugin letting you upload WordPress local files directly to your Amazon S3. It simplifies the file uploading process to your server. Many users love this plugin because of its user-friendly interface and the necessary tools on the admin dashboard.
The plugin lets you add multiple files with up to 5GB of capacity from your site to the S3 bucket. As an administrator, you can authorize others’ S3 file upload permission.
Moreover, Wasabi Smart File Uploads assists you in uploading files from WooCommerce product pages as well. You can ensure your products’ security on Wasabi and Amazon S3.
On the other hand, the plugin also helps you upload current S3 files back to your WordPress Media Library. However, your files are private to everybody regardless of being in a public bucket. Public option enabling is necessary for others to view your data.
#2 PDA Amazon S3 WordPress Uploads
The PDA’s Amazon S3 WordPress Uploads extension helps you protect your valuable video online courses and Amazon S3-hosted files.
With the extension, your tutorial videos are exclusively accessible to paid students. You only have to create a private S3 bucket, then configure CloudFront distribution, and finally, simply insert the S3 shortcode into your WordPress content.
#3 UpdraftPlus
UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular WordPress S3 plugins on the market. The plugin lets you create backups of your WordPress site for you to download or upload to the cloud. UpdraftPlus can schedule backups and operate complete or individual backups on demand as well.
Not only Amazon S3, but the plugin also supports Dropbox, Google Drive, FTP, SFTP, and other cloud storage services. Besides backing up, you can restore backups straight from the admin dashboard.
Ultimately, the premium version offers the ability to migrate or clone websites, database searching and replacing, and more.
#4 Smush
Images can significantly make your website slow down. Therefore, it is necessary to have an image optimization plugin. Smush is one of the most popular plugins that supports S3 image optimization.
The plugin can reduce up to 5MB in your image size, in bulk or individually. In the compressing procedure, you can feel relieved that no quality is ever taken away from your valuable image. Besides, you can improve your page performance by auto-resizing and lazy loading.
Smush will optimize all of your available images once you install and activate it. As long as you keep the plugin that way, newly uploaded images will be automatically resized as well.
Smush’s Pro version, which costs you $6 per month, improves in the size reduction and removes the size limits.
#5 EWWW Image Optimizer
EWWW Image Optimizer is designed cloud-based to assist S3 image compressing and optimizing. With this plugin, you can edit the image formats and enhance the image quality from the Media Library. Apart from S3, the plugin is compatible with Digital Ocean Spaces and Google Cloud Storage as well.
EWWW Image Optimizer lets users view attachments from databases and cache images through CDN features. The plugin supports off-screen images loading restriction and compressed images display.
Additionally, the users are able to have the original versions of images stored. EWWW Image Optimizer also enables searching and replacing specific images’ URL on your WordPress site with a cloud URL.
How to Upload Files from WordPress to Amazon S3 Bucket
As mentioned above, the importance of uploading your files from WordPress to Amazon S3 is undeniable. It reduces your server request which helps optimize page loading time, improve users’ experience, and boost SEO ranking.
We’ve published a concise tutorial for both the file uploading and offloading process from your WordPress site to Amazon S3. In addition, we also thoroughly give you 5 reasons not to self-host your WordPress videos. Check them out for more details.
Let’s Unburden Your WordPress Site!
To summarize, Amazon S3 is undoubtedly an almighty storage service with the listed goodnesses above. On the other hand, file storage and management is not the particular strength of WordPress. Therefore, with the assistance of the WordPress S3 plugins, you don’t have to burden your site with data anymore!
Do you know any other WordPress S3 plugins that are worth considering? Please let us know in the comment below!
