Find external images on your WordPress website without installing anything

You can’t tell from the outside whether your website loads images from other servers. Our free online check looks at your WordPress website the way a browser does and shows you in under a minute which images, fonts and services come from other servers. There is nothing to install and no sign-up. If you like, we then check every page and email you the full report with every location found, free of charge.

What the check looks at

The check opens your homepage and up to 19 more pages: the most important pages from your menu, the newest pages from your sitemap and your five latest posts. On each page it reads the HTML code and the linked CSS files. It finds:

• Images in your content, including galleries, srcset variants and lazy-loaded images.
• Background images from CSS, as used by Elementor, Divi and many themes for sections and headers.
• Social media preview images (Open Graph) in the page header.
• External services such as Google Fonts, YouTube, Google Maps or Gravatar, which are also loaded on every page view.
• Your own images via the WordPress.com CDN, when Jetpack delivers your images through other servers.

The check never loads the images themselves. It only reads their addresses, and the results page deliberately shows no previews. So checking your site sends no requests to the other servers.

How to read the result

At the top you see how many external images the check found and on how many other servers. Below that are the servers, for example your old website, static.wixstatic.com or an image service such as Unsplash, and the first places they were found.

Important: the result is a sample. All figures refer to the pages checked, not your entire website. If you want to know for sure, enter your email address at the end. We then check all pages in the background and send you the complete list with every location as a CSV file.

Why external images are a problem

• Privacy: every page view sends your visitors’ IP address to the other server.
• Missing images: if the old domain is shut down or the image deleted, an empty frame is all that remains.
• Loading time: every additional server costs a connection.
• Control: the other server can replace the image at any time.

You’ll find more on this, and how to spot individual external images in the editor, in our guide Import external images into WordPress.

What the check can’t see

The check only sees what is publicly in the HTML and CSS. Images loaded later by JavaScript, for example in some sliders or Instagram feeds, and pages behind a login are not included. The result is a technical check, not legal advice.

What next? Move external images to your own server

If the check found external images, the free plugin Replace External Images brings them into your media library in one go. It downloads every image, replaces the addresses in your content and shows you every step live.

1. Run the check and see whether, and from where, external images are loaded.
2. Make a backup and install the plugin.
3. Click “Import all” above your list of posts.
4. Run the check again. Only services you include on purpose should be left.

External services such as Google Fonts or YouTube are not images. For these, check whether they are listed in your privacy policy or whether you can host them locally.

Frequently asked questions

Does the check cost anything?

No. The preview and the full report by email are free.

Does the check work with any website?

It is built specifically for WordPress. For other systems it tells you what the website runs on. If you are planning to move to WordPress, check the new site after the move.

What happens to my email address?

We only use it to send you the report. You only get the newsletter if you tick the box and confirm by email.

My website is very large. Will it still work?

Yes. For the full report, the check reads all posts and pages of a WordPress site via the WordPress interface. Even sites with many thousands of posts are usually done in a few minutes.