The practice of hosting WordPress website visuals on Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) involves relocating image files from the WordPress server to Amazon S3’s cloud storage infrastructure. For example, instead of a website retrieving a logo from `/wp-content/uploads/logo.png` on the host server, it retrieves it from a designated S3 bucket such as `https://your-bucket-name.s3.amazonaws.com/logo.png`. This configuration requires adjustments to the WordPress setup to facilitate the transfer and retrieval of images from the external S3 storage location.
This approach offers several advantages. Primarily, it reduces the load on the WordPress server, improving website performance and scalability, particularly during periods of high traffic. Website loading speed often increase because S3 is designed for high availability and optimized data transfer. It also provides enhanced data redundancy and backup capabilities, as S3 is a geographically distributed and durable storage service. Historically, this method became popular as websites grew in complexity and needed to optimize performance and manage increasing media file sizes without burdening the web server’s resources.
