Want to store your website’s files on an external server while still making them available for download on your site? In this detailed tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the best WordPress cloud storage plugin to offload files for download in WordPress.
Offloading files for download in WordPress means storing media assets — like images, PDFs, videos, and other large downloadable files — outside your website’s main server.
Instead of keeping everything on your WordPress host, you can offload files to a remote storage service like Amazon AWS, Google Drive, and the like. This reduces the load on your web host’s server and speeds up your website’s performance which enables your site to better handle higher traffic.
In this in-depth guide, I’ll show step-by-step how to use WP Display Files, the best cloud storage plugin, to offload files for download in WordPress.
But first, let’s dig a bit deeper into why it makes sense to offload WordPress files on external platforms.
Let’s say you run an e-commerce store that sells downloadable products like eBooks, NFTs, digital art files, etc. Each time a customer requests a download, your website’s server needs to process and deliver that file to them.
This may not be a big deal if only a handful of people use your site at a time, and you plan to keep it that way.
But, if you’re on a shared hosting plan, have limited bandwidth, or the files you provide are relatively large, it can quickly become an issue. Each download request uses server bandwidth which can slow down your entire site and cause downtime if there are too many users downloading files simultaneously.
Offloading files to a cloud storage platform lets you add a link to the files on your website while the external service stores the files and handles the downloads. This frees up server resources and keeps your site fast for everyone.
WP Display Files is the best plugin for offloading and managing downloadable files in WordPress. It is purpose-built for sites that handle large digital files. Think: e-books, guides, software, media assets, etc.
WP Display Files lets you easily showcase, organize, and provide downloadable links to files stored on external platforms like Google Drive, Dropbox, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and more, directly on your WordPress site.
Here, I’ll walk through the steps to set up the WP Display Files plugin, connect to a remote storage service, and display them on your site. By the end, you’ll be able to offload files for download in WordPress.
Note: This plugin lets you offload and showcase files stored in Google Drive, Amazon AWS, Dropbox, Box Cloud, and of course, your site’s server. But for this tutorial, we’ll focus on using this WordPress cloud storage plugin to offload files in Dropbox.
Let’s get started.
That’s it! Head to your site’s front end to check out your Dropbox file library.
If you manage a WordPress site with a lot of files — think: WooCommerce sites that sell digital products, membership sites that offer file downloads, resource hubs for corporate companies, etc. — it isn’t ideal to store them on your web host.
WP Display Files is the best cloud storage plugin for offloading and managing downloadable files in WordPress. It lets you store files hosted on external cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Box Cloud, Google Drive, Web Servers, and Amazon S3, and link to them on your site.
With WP Display Files, you can use shortcodes to showcase files anywhere on the front end using pre-built templates available in both light and dark modes. Plus, it comes with advanced search, pagination, file previews, and additional features that deliver a stellar user experience for your site’s visitors.
Get WP Display Files and start offloading WordPress files for download in minutes!
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