I’m creating a WordPress catalog site, of which the products are stored in an Airtable database. This base remains the core of all our products, and with the use of a custom import script I’m pulling in the right data from Airtable to WordPress.

Now I’m wondering whether I should also import all images (which are stored in the Airtable product records as well) to the WordPress media library (thus duplicating them), or whether I can just use the Airtable image urls which the api is giving me. An inspection of an Airtable image url (with httpstatus.io/) tells me that Airtable serves them from Amazon S3 via Cloudfront.

On one hand I’m thinking it’s a good idea to use the airtable img urls because:

• They appear to be cdn-served and therefore faster and therefore good seo value



• it spares me importing hassle and hosting space

On the other hand, I also have some concerning thoughts about doing so:

• 
  
  dl.airtable.com is nowhere near the domain name of the wp site. Therefore google will punish you?



• WordPress will not be able to push them into the image sitemap.I might be able to code that in though. Would it be worth trying so?

I should be able to do both things, I’m just wondering which one is best SEO practice (if there is any notable difference).