How To Host Images (and Files) On Dropbox for Free

Host images or any file on Dropbox and reduce your blog’s loading time

This process also saves you storage space on your precious hosting account, by hosting static files. But please remember that Dropbox cannot act as a CDN in the long run and you might inevitably find yourself looking for a regular CDN someday. Till then, and up to a point you want to scale up to that level, you may use Dropbox as the CDN.

Get your Dropbox from here – this special referral link gives additional FREE 500MB storage!

If you want to learn how to use Dropbox for file storage and use it as a CDN, then skip directly to that section below by clicking here.

Some people do the mistake of uploading images to their WordPress blog by uploading it to their WP images directory.

This not only increases the website’s loading time but also adds up to your hosting space, eventually.

Fortunately, there is a neat way to mitigate this issue. We do this by using Dropbox’s free account feature as our CDN (Content Delivery Network)

If you don’t have Dropbox account yet, it’s now time to signup.

Login to dropbox and upload any image to your account that you want to add to the blog post.

After uploading, click on the image icon to see a button called ‘SHARE‘.

Clicking on the ‘SHARE‘ button will give the link you want to paste to your blog HTML.

Important Note: change the default URL from this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/azlux46yurbqkpp/Dropbox%2S…………..

to this:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/azlux46……….

This setting is necessary to make sure the images show up correctly because Dropbox has set the image preview as default with a black background.

To get only the image to display after we host images on Dropbox, we will now replace ‘www.dropbox.com’ with ‘dl.dropboxusercontent.com’ in the URL.

Update: both ‘dl.dropboxusercontent.com’ and ‘dl.dropbox.com’ works. (Just remember to delete ‘www’)

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How to Host Files on Dropbox as CDN

If you want to host files instead, simply follow the similar process of uploading the files to your Dropbox and get the link.

Change the URL endpoint from dl=0 to dl=1. Here’s a FREE PDF file for download for demo. This should take care of it!