Best Wordpress CDN

Abhijeet Pratap
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Best CDNs for Wordpress Websites

Website speed is a primary concern for website owners and bloggers since site speed is among the leading ranking factors. You need to keep your website optimized for loading fast and in less than a second since slow loading websites experience higher bounce rates and lower rankings.

Apart from speed, sites built in Wordpress must also consider security crucial since the Wordpress sites are among the most targeted by hackers.

While there are several optimizations you can make to keep your website fast and more secure, using a CDN will help you load content faster and will also offer an extra layer of security.

There are several CDN options for you if you are using Wordpress. However, the best CDN providers offer extra speed as well as extra security measures to prevent your website from getting hacked or falling victim to DDOS vulnerabilities.

What is a CDN?

CDNs are a group of interlinked servers that bring your content closer to the visitors. These CDNs have PoPs (points of presence) around the world to serve content to your visitors from the closest server.

They employ caching to speed up the delivery of static content to the end user. Apart from that, they also employ dynamic acceleration to accelerate the delivery of dynamic content to users.

Why use a CDN on your Wordpress website?

There are several reasons that you must consider using a CDN on your Wordpress website:

  • CDNs are cost effective. For a very small price, you can speed up your website significantly using a CDN.

  • Reduced bandwidth usage. A CDN allows you to reduce the pressure on the origin server which leads to less bandwidth usage and higher uptime. It also means reduced bandwidth expenses.

  • A CDN improves the delivery of content to visitors and helps reduce bounce rate. These things can improve SEO and rankings.

  • CDNs also offer other advantages like increased uptime. If your server is down for some reason, the CDN can show a cached copy to the users.

  • Higher availability. CDNs bring the website content closer to the users which means your content is available to users across the globe. If a user in Asia Pacific tries to access a website with its origin server located in North America, he will experience slower loading speed. However, a CDN can serve the same content from its Asia Pacific servers, which means users in Asia Pacific will also experience faster loading times, if the site has cdn enabled.

  • Higher security. CDNs also make your content secure. The best CDNs include DDOS protection and other types of protections. Cloudfront also provides origin shield at an extra cost. Cloudflare CDN also provides extra security options to protect your site.

How to select the right cdn for your Wordpress website?

There are several factors to consider when selecting a CDN for your Wordpress website. You will need to consider the overall performance of the CDN provider, costs, as well as security features. Moreover, you will need to see how easy or difficult it is to use and optimize a CDN according to your needs. Here is a list of factors to consider when selecting the right cdn.

Performance of the cdn provider

The performance of a CDN provider depends on several things including points of presence globally and you should select the one with a large network if you have a global audience.

If your audience is not global but located in a specific area like North America or Europe, then select the CDN service that has a large number of PoPs in that region.

Other factors affecting performance of a CDN Service include:

Latency: Time taken by data to reach the user from the server. Lower latency means faster content delivery.

Cache hit ratio: The number of requests being served from the cdn cache rather than the origin server. Higher cache ratio is equal to superior cdn performance.

Bandwidth Usage: Monitor bandwidth usage to understand cdn performance especially during peak times and to learn if the cdn is able to handle higher traffic load.

Throughput: Amount of data delivered successfully through a cdn during a specific period of time. Higher throughput means the cdn can successfully handle higher traffic and larger files.

Error Rate: The error rate defines the number of failed requests compared to the number of total requests. A lower error rate means more reliable content delivery.

TTFB or Time to First Byte: TTFB is a crucial factor affecting user experience and defines the time taken between the request made by the user and the delivery of the first byte of data. It is used to determine the responsiveness of a cdn.

These are the main factors that define the performance of a CDN service and must be considered to know how well a particular cdn performs. You can also use cdnperf website to learn about the performance of specific cdn brands.

Cost

Cost is also an important factor to be considered when selecting the right cdn service for your website. If you are on a limited budget, you might want to try a free or low priced option. While some CDNs have fixed prices for various tiers, some price their services based on monthly usage. However, it also depends on your traffic level and the types of features you need.

There are some free cdn options for Wordpress users. Mostly they have limited options compared to paid CDN but they can still be useful for small blogs and websites with limited traffic and for speeding up the delivery of static assets.

A good cdn service will not cost you much unless you need extra security features like origin shield or extra optimizations and storage. Based on your website traffic, you can control the features you pay for. Some CDN services also provide extra useful features as simply add-ons without having to pay per request or based on per GB of data transferred.

Ease of use and optimization

Lastly, it is important to consider how easily you can use and optimize a cdn for your website.

Unless you are highly tech savvy, you would not want to use a cdn service that is too complicated to set up and offers very limited support.

In the case of some cdn providers, they provide support through chat and email.

Others may provide limited support, but you will find enough documentation and community support to help you deal with any issues or difficulties that you might face. These factors must be considered when deciding which cdn to use.

The user interface also plays an important role when it comes to deciding the right cdn. A friendly and easy to use interface makes it easier to setup, use and optimize the cdn for your wordpress website. You should be able to easily understand the features and their application so you can optimize them easily. Otherwise, a wrong setting can prove costly and hurt SEO as well as user experience.

Best CDN providers for Wordpress Websites

Here, we have listed the best CDN providers that offer reliable services and which you can confidently use on your Wordpress website.

Bunny CDN

Bunny CDN is ranked as a top cdn in terms of overall performance by cdnperf.com. Bunny.net offers a feature rich, high performance CDN service that can significantly speed up web applications. Apart from excellent options to improve website speed and performance, Bunny CDN also offers excellent security features.

  • 123 PoPs
  • Excellent CDN performance
  • DNS speed up
  • Permacache
  • Automatic optimizer and image optimization
  • Easy to set up
  • Custom CDN domain and free ssl
  • Five different zones from $0.01/gb to $0.06/gb
  • User friendly interface
  • Easy to set up

Bunny CDN is an excellent option for Wordpress users. You pay as you use and the user interface is quite user friendly. There are excellent caching and other speed optimizations to speed up your Wordpress blog. You can also add canonical headers, which is beneficial in terms of SEO. Using the permacache feature, you can speed up your website even more. Bunny cdn also provides detailed performance statistics on the dashboard. You can see the cache hit rate, bandwidth use and the number of requests served through cdn. Bunny CDN also offers excellent security options like blocking referrers, IP blocking , origin shield and so on. If you want to speed up your DNS, you can also create a DNS zone in your bunny.net account.

Cloudflare CDN

Cloudflare is another fast and secure option for Wordpress users wanting to implement a CDN on their website. It has a large global network and offers several speed and security features apart from brotli compression and other customizations. Cloudflare integrates at the DNS level and offers the benefits of premium DNS. Cloudflare also offers a free plan that provides you the benefits of a global cdn, several more basic optimizations including five free page rules, free minification, brotli compression and so on.

Cloudflare also includes an important feature for Wordpress users. The Wordpress users can benefit from Cloudflare’s Automatic Platform Optimization for Wordpress which includes several features that will speed up your Wordpress installation significantly. It is available for $5 a month or for free with the pro account.

Cloudflare Features:

  • Premium DNS
  • Minification and Brotli compression
  • Page rules
  • Argo smart routing
  • Automatic Optimization for Wordpress
  • SSL
  • Optimized Caching
  • Varying levels of security based on your needs including captcha verification

If you want, you can try cloudflare using the free tier. The paid tier or Pro tier is priced at $20 which also includes Automatic optimization for Wordpress. You can purchase Argo smart routing to avoid traffic congestion and deliver content even faster.

Cloudflare is also a great CDN when it comes to security features. It offers DDoS and WAF protection as well as page rules to make your website even more secure.

Cloudfront CDN

The Cloudfront CDN is also a leading name among CDNs. Cloudfront by AWS is also a great option for speeding up the delivery of your Wordpress site to users across the world. With more than 600 PoPs, Cloudfront is one of the best options for Wordpress websites with a global audience. Cloudfront is awesome in terms of speed and performance with lower latency. It also offers HTTP3 support over QUIC and security features like DDoS protection.

You can also use AWS WAF with Cloudfront. For best results, use it with AWS Premium DNS Route 53. You can set your own custom cdn domain and get a free ssl for your custom domain from AWS certificate manager. For additional protection, Cloudfront also offers Sql protections and rate limiting as well as bot protection.

Cloudfront features:

  • HTTP2 and HTTP3 support
  • DDOS protection
  • Global presence with more than 600 PoPs.
  • Compression
  • TLSv1.2_2021
  • Sql protections, rate limiting and bot protection for additional security
  • Create your own cache policy

Cloudfront integrates and works excellently with Wordpress. For those wanting to create their own custom domain like cdn.example.com, they can get a free ssl certificate from AWS certificate manager and create its DNS entry in AWS Route 53.

Cloudfront might be a bit difficult to set up for the beginners. However, there is a lot of documentation and several online tutorials that can help you set up Cloudfront cdn for your Wordpress website.

Key CDN

Key CDN is another popular and cost effective cdn utilized by Wordpress users to improve website speed. The CDN service mainly focuses on speed. KeyCDN has more than 60 points of presence across 40 countries in 6 continents.

It offers all the important features required to speed up cdn including gzip and brotli compression as well as IPV6 support and image processing.

KeyCDN also offers several security features including DDoS protection, secure token, bad bot protection, free ssl and so on. KeyCDN is also easy to set up and implement on your Wordpress website.

Pricing starts from $0.04/gb for the first 10Tb of data transferred. However, there is a minimum charge of $4 per month for using KeyCDN. KeyCDN is also highly scalable and so you do not have to worry about sudden traffic spikes.

KeyCDN features:

  • 60 + PoPs across 6 continents
  • Easy pay as you go pricing
  • Security features including bad bot protection, free ssl and origin shield as well as DDoS protection
  • Brotli and Gzip compression
  • IPV6 support
  • Image processing to optimize and speed up image loading
  • Two factor authentication
  • Custom cdn domain and custom ssl

KeyCDN is also one of the best cdn services for Wordpress. It has been around since 2012 and is highly popular among Wordpress users because of its speed and reliable services.

Sucuri CDN

Sucuri is a well known name in Wordpress security. However, Sucuri also offers a cdn service that speeds up and secures your website. Sucuri cdn caches your website content automatically and speeds up websites by an average of 60%. While website security is an important focus for Sucuri cdn, it does not come at the cost of speed.

The Sucuri cdn runs on a global anycast network and provides you multiple caching options to speed up your website. With Sucuri, you can enable WAF protection as well as a DNS level firewall.

Sucuri Features:

  • Speed optimization (speed improvement of 60% on average)
  • Multiple caching options
  • Reliable uptime
  • High availability
  • Built on global anycast network
  • Dedicated support
  • No manual setup required (change dns and done)
  • Daily security scans and malware detection

Sucuri is an excellent option for websites that are concerned for both speed and security. However, it may not be the right option for you if you are on a budget. Its basic plan starts from $199 but it will also provide you protection against SEO spam. If your website has been hacked, Sucuri can help you cleanup and bring your website back.

Previously, Wordpress users had one more solid option for CDN. The Stackpath CDN (formerly max CDN) has been a reliable option for users for several years. However, Stackpath has stopped providing CDN services since 2023. Despite that, Wordpress users have access to some great options to speed up and secure their website.

If you need a free plan, you have Cloudflare. Other cost effective and fast and reliable options include Cloudfront, Bunny CDN and KeyCDN. Sucuri is a bit costly but great for websites that are frequently under attack.

How to implement a CDN in Wordpress?

Implementing a cdn in Wordpress is easy and the best method to implement a cdn in Wordpress is to use a plugin. There are several plugins you can use to implement a CDN including caching plugins like W3TC and WP Rocket or the cdn enabler.

If you are using W3TC for aching on your website, go to Performance -> General settings and then scroll down to the cdn section. Click in the eheckbox to enable cdn and then select generic Mirror for CDN type. If the CDN you are using is listed in the CDN type, select it or use generic Mirror. Now, save the settings.

Now, from the W3TC settings in the sidebar go to CDN and insert the cdn url in the box where it says ‘Replace site’s hostname with’. For SSL support, select ‘enabled, always use https’. You can test the cdn connection by clicking on ‘Test mirror’. If you get a positive response, you have successfully enabled cdn on your website. You can also use W3TC to create and apply your own Cloudfront cdn distribution. W3TC pro allows for full site delivery via cdn.

Applying a cdn with Wp Rocket is even easier. Go to the CDN section and enable CDN and then insert the cdn url. Your website will now serve static assets through the cdn.

You can also use the cdn enabler plugin or other caching plugins like Autoptimize to enable cdn for your Wordpress website.