Move your WordPress media to Zinn® storage

Images and video are usually the largest thing a WordPress site serves. Moving them into Zinn® object storage takes that weight off your web server and off your disk allowance.

You never enter an access key

This is the part worth reading, because it is what makes our plugin different from the rest of the category.

Every other media-offload plugin asks you to paste an S3 access key and secret into WordPress. They are then stored in your wp_options table, where every other plugin on your site can read them, where they are copied into every migration export, and where they sit in the backup you send to a developer. If that pair leaks, your whole bucket is exposed.

Ours never holds one. The plugin holds a token that works for this site's folder and nothing else, and before each upload it asks us for a one-time signed link. Your file then goes straight from your web server to storage — it never passes through us.

If that token is ever exposed, you revoke it from your dashboard in one click. You cannot do that to a leaked access key.

Turning it on

1. Open your site in the dashboard and go to Files & databases → Media offload.
2. Press Turn on media offload. Your storage is set up for you.
3. Press Get a pairing code. The code works once and expires in thirty minutes.
4. Install Zinn® Media Offload on your WordPress site, go to

Settings → Zinn® Media Offload, paste the code and press Connect.

New uploads move immediately. Your existing library moves in the background over the following hours, a few files at a time, picking up where it left off if anything interrupts it.

What happens to your media today

Your files are copied into Zinn® storage, and your site carries on serving its own copies. Nothing about your pages changes yet.

That is deliberate: uploading and serving are two steps, and the first one is safe to do on its own. Once media is moving, turn on Rewrite media URLs and your pages start pointing at the CDN instead of at your web server.

Where your media is served from

Most sites are served from our shared media hostname the moment you switch rewriting on. There is nothing to set up.

Footprint-free sites are different, and deliberately so. They are never served from a shared Zinn® hostname, because every site using it would advertise the same address in its page source — which is exactly the link between your sites that footprint-free hosting exists to prevent. So a footprint-free site serves its own media until you give it a domain of its own: create a subdomain (media.yoursite.com, say), point it at your bucket, and enter it under Media domain in the dashboard. Your media is then served from your domain, and nothing connects it to anything else you own.

You can use your own domain on any site, not only a footprint-free one — it is simply optional everywhere else.

Settings live in your dashboard, not in WordPress

The plugin has no settings of its own beyond the pairing code. Whether URLs are rewritten and whether local copies are removed are decided in your Zinn® dashboard, so there is only ever one place an answer lives and no way for the two to disagree.

Removing local copies

Off by default. When you switch it on, a file is only ever removed once every size of it has uploaded successfully — a partial upload never deletes anything, because that would leave thumbnails in neither place with no original left to rebuild them from.

If something goes wrong

If our storage cannot be reached when you upload, the upload still succeeds and the file stays on your server, exactly as it would without the plugin. The settings screen shows what went wrong, and the background pass picks the file up later.

Deactivating the plugin stops new uploads. Media already moved keeps working.

Using your own bucket

You can attach your own S3-compatible bucket in the dashboard instead of using ours — the plugin works the same way, and still never holds the key.