It is a proven fact that website speed plays a vital role in SEO. A website that responds faster with low latency is always preferred by the search engine. But for a website accessed from various geographic locations, it is very hard to maintain the same fast speed everywhere. The place where your server is located is more likely to perform faster than places far away. Your web host, like SiteGround, can also help you.
But also, in these cases, a CDN comes into play. CDN solves this problem by caching your website content on to their servers located all across the globe. This makes the website to open faster wherever the user is accessing the website from.
So it is always recommended to have a CDN service associated with your website. But there are so many Content Delivery Network providers to choose from and hence to clear your confusion here we have discussed some of the popular and reliable CDN’s for your WordPress website.
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Table of Contents
What is CDN and how it works?
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network. And as its name suggests, CDN is a network of Proxy Servers and Data Centers which are well distributed geographically across the globe to deliver the website content faster to the end-user.
Usually what happens is that every website has its hosting server located to a specific area. Now wen someone accesses the website the hosted content is provided to the user via that server. Now the speed and performance of the website depending on the location from where you are accessing the website.
If you are located to the nearby location of the server then you’ll get a nice experience but if you are located to a remote area then connecting to the hosted content of the website comes at a cost of high latency or slow website.
CDN solves the problem. As it is a broad network of servers located across the globe, the end-user access the nearby CDN server where the website content is already available in the cached form, instead of accessing the hosting server. Thereby reducing the latency and website loading time.
Best CDN Services for your WordPress Website
Here is the list of best CDN providers for WordPress. But you can also use it on other websites without any problem.
Cloudfront from Amazon – Premium CDN
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the widely used web services and to complement that, Amazon is also providing its own content Delivery Network which is really very easy to use with the AWS. It has a global network of 208 different locations across 42 countries covering North & South America, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
Its deep integration with AWS enables us to have access to all the basic AWS features and it also doesn’t cost any extra charges for data transfer between Cloudfront and other AWS services like Amazon S3.
Price: FREE 50GB Per Month for 12 Months, depends upon usage (approx. 100$ for 1TB mixed usage)
Cloudflare – Best in Class CDN
One of the most widely used CDN services worldwide is Cloudflare. This is because all the basic Cloudflare features are available for free to use. Cloudflare asks for money only when you opt for extra features like instant support, mobile optimization, multi-user access, etc.
Cloudflare provides a free SSL certificate and doesn’t charge for Bandwidth usage which I loved personally. The integration of your website with Cloudflare is very simple and easy. And you can also disable Cloudflare with just one click anytime you want for some reason.
Price: FREE basic Plan, $20/Month for Pro, $200/Month for Business, Enterprise plan depends upon usage.
Stackpath (MaxCDN) – Most Affordable CDN
Another popular and feature-rich CDN service is Stackpath. This CDN service is used by many popular blogs including some from our personal circle due to its wide range of plans that this CDN provides.
The Stackpath CDN is a great option for those whose traffic priority is western countries as its majority of servers are in the western countries including 13 in North America, and 9 in Europe. It also has servers in Asia, and Brazil as well.
Price: starts from $10 for the basic plan (1TB Bandwidth)
Google Cloud CDN
Google Cloud is one of the leading web service providing companies. Then how this could be possible without providing CDN services. Google Cloud CDN serves a very easy to use and wide server coverage of 200+ globally located POPs.
North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East Oceania, and Africa are the main POPs. You can surely rely on the Google Cloud CDN service for your WordPress website.
Price: depends upon usage
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is most popular because its CDN service plan starts fro $4.00/month. This is a really very affordable price for a CDN that provides features like Free SSL, HTTP/2 Support, Secure Token, Origin Shield, real-time analytics, and a RESTful API.
It ha very wide covering Points of Presence (POPs), mainly in key areas. E.g. 10 in North America, 10 in Europe, three in Asia, one in Oceania and one in South America. Specifically for WordPress integration, KeyCDN provides options like WP-Rocket, Super-Cache, W3 Total Cache Plugin, ZenCache, etc. for better caching of the website.
Price: Min. usage starts from $4, depends upon usage (approx. $40-50 for 1TB mixed usage)
BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN has a very wide coverage of POPs with tier one networks. To be more precise, it has 13 POPs in Europe, 11 in North America, 1 in Africa, 1 in South America, and 14 in Asia a6nd Oceania. With its SSD-based servers, you can run your website with extraordinary high speed and low latency.
BunnyCDN provides a 14-day free trial which is a fairly enough time to test the service and all-in-all it is a recommended WordPress CDN service.
Price: 14 days FREE Trial, min. payment starts from 1$ (pay as you go)
Free CDN of your hosting
You can also opt for Content Delivery Service for free. Many of the popular hosting providers collaborated with the CDN service providers to bundle the service in their hosting plans. Hosting providers like Kinsta and WPEngine provide hosting plans included with CDN. You just have to activate the service from the dashboard. Companies like SiteGround and Bluehost partners with Cloudflare for providing WordPress CDN integration.
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Advantages of using CDN
Using a CDN service has a huge number of advantages. Here are the five most effective of them.
1. Less Host Server Load
Using A CDN will surely decrease the server load. The use of CDN actually makes users access the website through CDN’s servers making the main Hosting server handle less load. It can help in handling a large number of a sudden increase in visitors on the website.
2. Security & Storage
CDN does not just reduce the latency of the communication with the site but also provides more security. In addition to this, you also get more storage for archiving and data backup services.
3. Faster Content Delivery
This is the main working of a CDN service. It always keeps the website to respond faster so that the delivery of the website’s content can get faster with low latency and response time.
4. Easier Audience Segmentation
CDN service is capable of providing different content to different users depending upon factors like device type, location, etc. for a better experience to different kinds of users.
5. Lower Packet Loss & Latency
CDN makes it very convenient and jitter-free for the user to have an improved stream quality. Hence, It can, therefore, provide high-quality online services at lower cost and server load.
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Final Verdict
We have tried both Cloudflare and Cloudfront on our personal websites and results were amazing. Even, still, I am using Cloudflare on TME.NET and it is producing well-balanced optimizations. The side loads less than 500ms most of the time. And the full load time is in between 2 to 3 seconds depending upon the location. On the other hands, Cloudfront is also very good but slightly on the expensive side. I have used it for 18-20 months and I can say you won’t regret it if you can afford its charges. On the other hands, if you are looking for cheaper options, you should definitely consider Stakpath earlier known as MaxCDN.
It basically covers the USA and European countries. Rest of the countries it delivers average performance. Therefore, you can go for it if you have a majority of the traffic from these mentioned countries. All in all, there are three recommended CDN services from my side for your WordPress website. You can also try other cheaper options if your budget is even lesser. Nowadays, hosting companies have also started offering their pre-built CDN services. So, that is another option without paying extra charges. If so they are very minimal.
Recommendation: Cloudflare (Easy to setup) > CloudFront (Expensive) > StackPath (MaxCDN) (Most affordable) > Google Cloud CDN (slightly complicated to setup).
