Featured Image Relay turns any remote image into a normal WordPress featured image. No downloads, no storage, no bloated media library — and nothing in your markup says the photo came from Amazon.
No account. No card. Deactivate any time and your site is exactly as it was.Every affiliate site hits the same wall, and neither of the usual answers is any good.
| Hotlink from Amazon | Download everything | Image Relay | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disk space used | None | Gigabytes | None |
| URL is unique to your site | No — Amazon's | Yes | Every tier |
| Source merchant hidden | Visible in the URL | Yes | Every tier |
| Served from your own hostname | No | Yes | Premium |
| Survives the source vanishing | Breaks | Yes | Never breaks |
| WebP + resizing | No | Manual | Automatic |
| Descriptive filenames | No | Manual | Automatic |
| Backups stay small | Yes | No | Yes |
| Reversible | — | No | One click |
This is the part affiliate marketers care about most — and most of it works on the free tier.
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81vT4kQ2mHL._AC_SL1500_.jpghttps://img.youcansecureit.com/8f2b1c…/nikon-z6-mirrorless-camera.webphttps://img.yoursite.com/8f2b1c…/nikon-z6-mirrorless-camera.webpBoth relay versions do three things a hotlink cannot. The merchant is invisible — the source URL never appears in your markup, so competitors scraping your pages cannot read your supplier or feed URLs out of your image tags. The filename carries your keywords instead of an Amazon SKU. And the URL is unique to your site: the hash comes from the source image and your site together, so two sites running the same product never share an image URL, however many people are pushing it.
Premium adds the piece free cannot — your own hostname. Your domain, your filename, your URL, end to end. Those are the things Google's own image SEO documentation asks for. Nobody can promise you positions in image search, and anyone who does is selling you something, but this puts your images on the right side of that guidance rather than the wrong one.
The plugin creates a lightweight attachment that behaves like genuine media, so your theme needs no changes at all.
Works with the_post_thumbnail(), archive grids, related-post widgets and social
preview tags — untouched.
Product and gallery images work the same way — useful when dropshipping from a supplier catalogue you would rather not mirror.
Images in post content are rewritten as the page renders, including lazy-loading themes that
put a placeholder in src.
The plugin contacts the relay and your site is provisioned automatically. No signup form, no key to paste.
Featured images, WooCommerce galleries and post content are scanned, and each image is registered with the relay.
Fetched once, cached, resized, converted to WebP, with an SEO-friendly filename. Your database is never touched.
Your original links are never modified in the database — the swap happens at render time. Deactivate and every image is back to its original URL. Nothing to undo or migrate.
If a source dies or a merchant blocks us, the visitor is redirected to the original URL instead of an error. The relay being unreachable is not an outage for your site.
If a hundred sites use the same Amazon photo it is fetched and stored once. That is not a detail — it is why a hundred-site licence costs what it does.
Sites embedding your images to use your bandwidth get a generated notice image at the same dimensions. Search engines and social platforms are allowlisted, so previews are unaffected.
| Free | Premium | |
|---|---|---|
| Remote images from any source | 50 images | Unlimited |
| WebP, resizing, SEO filenames, fail-open | Yes | Yes |
| Unique URL, merchant hidden | Yes | Yes |
| Served from your own hostname | Shared domain | img.yoursite.com |
| Corner note on images | Yes | None, on your own domain |
| CDN mode for your own uploads | No | Yes |
| Hotlink protection | No | Yes |
| Account required | None at all | Licence key |
Free is not a trial and does not expire. The cap is 50 distinct registered images — images, not page views and not bandwidth. A review site gets through that quickly, which is rather the point: you will know whether this suits you long before you pay anything.
Straight about the corner note: images served from our shared domain carry a small note in the corner, and that includes licensed sites that have not set up their own image domain yet. Premium serves your images from your domain with no note — one DNS record, live in about fifteen minutes. We would rather tell you now than have you buy and wonder why nothing changed. Thumbnails under 200px are always left clean. See the DNS instructions for your registrar.
Licences run for one year; the trial runs for three days. Your site activates automatically once payment completes. All prices in USD.
If a licence lapses your images keep working — they fall back to the shared domain with the corner note, exactly like the free tier. Nothing breaks and nothing is held hostage.
Yes. Install the plugin and it works — the relay provisions your site the first time it makes contact. A licence key only comes into it if you go Premium.
Nothing here changes your affiliate links, tags or disclosures — only how images are delivered. You remain responsible for complying with your programme's terms and for having the right to display the images you use, exactly as you would when hotlinking or downloading them.
Your posts still contain their original image URLs, untouched. Deactivate the plugin and every image reverts. If the relay is simply unreachable, visitors are redirected to the original images automatically — your pages keep working without you lifting a finger.
Not in the global-edge-network sense. It is a single-origin caching proxy that fetches, converts, resizes and caches. Premium can route your own uploads through it too, which is what most people mean when they ask.
No. The cache is a cache — files are evicted on a least-recently-used basis. This is not backup and not hosting, and you should not use it as either.
The relay re-checks every 24 hours and quietly falls back to the shared domain. Your images never break. Put the record back and they return on the next check.
Yes — update notices, one-click updates and the auto-updates toggle all work in WordPress, the same as a plugin from the directory.
This is a service for legitimate commercial and editorial images. Pornography, drugs, gambling, weapons and unlawful material are prohibited, and sites using it for those are banned permanently with no refund. Full terms in the acceptable use policy.
No account, no card, no commitment. If it does not suit you, deactivate the plugin and your site is exactly as it was.