Does it matter for site speed if I upload images from the product page or into settings > files?

[AndreiSu]

Hello,

Does it matter for site speed if I upload images directly from the product page or if I first upload them into the settings > files and then use their URLs to add these images to my product page?

The reason why I'm asking is that I've heard there's something called CDN and that all the images uploaded from settings > files are benefiting from it, which can be seen from their URLs that are assigned a version (like v=1635064649) showing that this image is stored in CDN.

But the images uploaded directly from the product page don't have this extra URL extension. Does that mean that they do not benefit from CDN and are slower to load?

Also, all of my images are bout 40-80 KB, should I even bother?

Thank you

[Elias · Accepted solution]

Hello, @AndreiSu.

Thank you for posting this question!

There isn't a difference to uploading images directly to your products or through the Files settings, as all assets (eg. images, files, CSS, scripts, etc.) are stored and delivered by our CDN. 

I hope this helps clarify your questions! If you have any other questions on this topic, don't hesitate to let me know!

[ihernandez]

@Elias Hi, does it matter if i use dropbox, aws,  or drive links of images to upload to the site so it is not stored in the files? or does that slow down the site? for example, i use matrixify to upload aws links of all our product images.

[Elias]

Hi, @ihernandez.

Thanks for joining the thread!

It is possible to use Dropbox to for storing and uploading images when importing product using CSVs. However, this isn't something that we'd recommend as the main storage for your files as there could be some technicalities when it comes to using them with other aspects of Shopify. In short, you can't use Dropbox as the content delivery network (CDN) for things like product images but you can use Dropbox to host and upload the images onto our CDN (when you upload products using CSVs). Since our Files section doesn't have a size limit, then you can use this to store most of your files. Nevertheless, there are some file requirements for different file types that you should be aware of. 

As for the slowing or speeding up your store, it's usually best to reduce the amount of connections between servers for the best performance so having an extra server (eg. Dropbox) to connect to may not improve the speeds by much. On that note, if you'd like to learn more about improving your online store speed, then we'd recommend taking a look at some of the factors that you can control from our help guide. 

If you have any other questions on this topic, then please don't hesitate to let me know!