I Stopped Clicking Around wp-admin and Treated WordPress Media Offload Like Infrastructure

I Stopped Clicking Around wp-admin and Treated WordPress Media Offload Like Infrastructure WordPress media libraries have a habit of turning into infrastructure problems in slow motion. At first it is just uploads. Then it is product galleries, thumbnails, originals, PDFs, course files, and downloads piling up on the same server that is supposed to stay lean. That arrangement does not age well. Disks fill up, backups get bloated, restore times get longer, and moving a site between environments becomes more painful than anyone expected. The media library quietly becomes one of the least portable parts of the stack. The first fix is straightforward: stop keeping all of that media on the WordPress server. Offloading uploads to object storage such as Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3, or Google Cloud Storage takes that weight off the app layer and makes the stack easier to scale. But offloading media creates a second problem. Somebody still has to configure the provider, test the account, migrate e