What do you do about images?
1. Move all of your images and static assets (zip, downloads, pdfs, videos) that are not part of WordPress textual content to something like S3+Cloudfront. Maintain that as in a sub-domain `https://static.brajeshwar.com/` Now, start using it in your writing as `<img src=“https://static.brajeshwar.com/2024/beautiful-picture.webp”>`. This makes it easy and allows you to switch WordPress hosting providers in minutes if not seconds. In my case, around late 2000s and early 2010s, I keep getting warned by Media Temple (mt) of the bandwidth and so Amazon’s S3 came to the rescue.† WordPress plugins are a galore that does the re-direct. That solved multiple problems - not tied down to a particular hosting provider, a CDN that is simple and cheap. Thus, moving out of WordPress with the text that contains those links will continue to just work.
2. Once you move to Static HTMLs, in my case, I felt that it makes more sense to just have them together in one folder — `brajeshwar.com` with everything in it — all the files. I also tend to ask the question and try answering, “Can I move out easily?” That has let me to not use images and other non-essential contents as much as I can avoid. An article/post should continue to work and be meaningful even if the images fails.
† My website was kinda of a deal back then. Now, CloudFlare claims that my website does about 4-5GB a month in bandwidth. This is after I have deleted many, delegated most downloads to Github, and to S3+ CloudFront sub-domains such as `cdn.oinam.com` and `archives.oinam.com`. During the days when (mt) complains is when it hits like 50GB a month on downloads, etc.
In all of this, these days, I pay single digit dollar every month to maintain my entire personal website and the remnants of its past. I don’t want the links from Adobe, Google, Wikipedia, the Chinese, the Russians, etc. to end up in a 404.
There are other image CDNs (Cloudinary, Imagekit, Imgix) but they have been designed for developers and are prohibitively expensive beyond their free-tier.
[1]: https://magecdn.com/
I know some people use S3 services for hosting images, but then you have to worry about generating your own thumbnails etc. and it's trickier.
This is one reason why I started asking, “Is this image really needed for this article.” As for the thumbnail generation, I used to have a few Photoshop actions that I just click and be done with.
Now, I just manually optimize the few images I uses in such a way that it is somewhere in the middle -- CSS can still shrink it as a thumbnail but the original isn't that too large either. Something like that.
If you still maintain that a popular website to worry about images that much, I would try out CloudFlare image service.