Configure Bunny CDN On a Wordpress Website
HOW TO USE BUNNY CDN TO SPEED UP YOUR WORDPRESS WEBSITE
Bunny CDN was created by a developer who was troubled by skyrocketing cdn bills back in 2012. The primary aim behind the creation of bunny.net was to disrupt the overpriced cdn market.
Bunny CDN itself was introduced in 2015. Now, Bunny is not just among the top performing cdn services but also one of the most customer friendly and economically priced. CDN prices might have reduced a lot since a decade ago. However, Bunny CDN offers much more than any common cdn service and that too at highly affordable prices.
We will not talk about the pricing of Bunny CDN since you can check out the details on Bunny website.. However, in this article, we will talk about the features and how to easily set up bunny cdn for your website and make it hop faster.
Bunny offers a user friendly dashboard where you can easily set up pull zones and serve your website assets through cdn within minutes. You have the option to pay as you go and so being overcharged at the end of the month is never a worry for Bunny CDN users. Bunny also offers more services including DNS and it is recommended to use Bunny’s high speed DNS for your website. It allows you to speed up your DNS with its cdn service.
There are several more exciting features including those aimed at bringing cache hit ratio to near 100% and other optimizations that can make significant improvements to your wordpress website’s loading speed.
Bunny has 123 global points of presence and it offers website acceleration with cdn as well as image optimization, as well as video and image delivery plus game delivery and website security solutions. The cdn has also been ranked as the number one cdn provider for Wordpress websites.
According to cdnperf, a website that measures the performance of cdn services, Bunny Cdn is the best in terms of overall performance followed closely by Amazon Cloudfront cdn.
Key Features of Bunny CDN:
Before discussing how to configure and use Bunny CDN, let’s take a look at the key features included with Bunny CDN and why Bunny CDN is touted as the best. Bunny.net offers cdn as well as storage, streaming and DNS services. If you want to stream videos, you can use Bunny.net and you can also use Bunny.net for storing large files like you do with Amazon S3 bucket.
Here, we will focus mainly on the Bunny CDN service. Bunny is a collection of services and its cdn is highly optimized for use with Wordpress and can help accelerate Wordpress significantly.
Here are the key features of Bunny’s CDN services. Like other CDN services, it allows you to create pull zones, but there is more to it than any common cdn:
Custom host name: You can easily set up a custom hostname. The process is quite simple. If you want to use cdn.example,com as your cdn url, you can do that easily instead of using the Bunny provided cdn url. Easy one click ssl for your custom domain names applied within minutes.
Safehop: A unique feature of bunny cdn that allows it to retry requests to the origin in a round robin fashion when errors or connection failures happen. This improves reliability and reduces errors
Smart cache: Automatically determines what type of content must be cached based on file extension and mime type, allowing for easy full site acceleration..
Permacache: Permacache or permanent cache is a very important feature of Bunny cDn that can significantly accelerate your website. It automatically pulls content from your website and stores it permanently in cache. You will need to create the storage and Permacache will pull the files from your website automatically and your users will get ultrafast loading times no matter where they are located across the globe.
Request Coalescing: Coalesces cdn requests and reduces the pressure on the origin server.
Security Features: Includes a large number of security features like blocking root path access, blocking referrer, and blocking ips as well as s3 authentication and token authentication. Additional security features are included in traffic manager and edge rules.
Traffic Manager: Traffic manager can be used to block traffic from specific geographical regions.
Headers: Canonical and CORS headers.
Bunny Optimizer: Another important speed feature available for $9.5/month for those who want ultra fast loading times for their website. The bunny optimizer, optimizes and serves images on the fly in the webp format.
Edge rules: Edge rupees to further optimize website speed and security.
Bunny CDN is loaded with features that include website acceleration and security features.
Bunny CDN has adopted and affordable and customer friendly pricing strategy. The services are divided into five zones including Europe, Asia and Oceania, North America, South America and Middle East & Africa.
The prices start from as low as $0.01 per zone per gb to $0.06 per zone per gb. Suppose, your users are mainly located in the European region, and you want to use only the Europe zone. In that case, you will pay only $0.01 per gb data transferred. You can pay as you go and there are no hidden charges. You can recharge and keep your account recharged based on your average consumption. If you are not using the cdn, you will not be charged.
How to set up Bunny CDN on a Wordpress website
Create a Pull zone
Bunny CDN offers a user friendly dashboard that is very easy to use and you can easily set up cdn services for your website. Login to your Bunny cdn account and then click on cdn. Now, click on add pull zone. Give your pull zone a name and then add the origin domain (your website domain). Select the standard tier for your blog unless you have a very large website with enormous monthly traffic. After having made the selections, click on add pull zone. The pull zone will be created.
Add Custom Hostname
Now, you can add custom hostnames. Come back to the main dashboard and click on the just created pull zone.You can add the custom hostname from here. Create a custom hostname like cdn.mysite.com. Click on add hostname and then verify and activate ssl for your custom cdn domain.
Go to your dns provider and then add an A record for your cdn domain pointing to your public ip. Once verification is complete, you can activate ssl for your custom cdn domain. It will hardly take a few minutes.
Then check out the origin. If your origin (your website domain) uses SSL, make sure you have added https in the origin. Enable safehop and then move on configuring caching for your cdn.
Configure caching Bunny CDN
Now is the time to configure caching on your Bunny cdn. You can enable smart caching which will itself decide dynamically which file types have to be cached based on the file extension type and mime type. You can also set the cache expiration time to respect origin cache control or override it. If you choose to override the origin cache control, you can set it according to your choice in hours, days, weeks or months. For example, you can set it to override and cache 12 hours. It means the cache will refresh every 12 hours.
You can also set browser cache expiration time to match server cache expiration time (as set on your origin server) or you can override it to fix your own expiration time like a day. . You will find all the vary cache settings disab;ed by default. However, you can enabled them according to your choice. If you want to set Vary Cache, you can learn more about it here.
If you want a cookieless domain, you can also set to strip cookies.
The permacache is an essential setting if you want your website to hop really very fast. However, you will need to create a storage zone and attach it to your newly created pull zone to enable permacache in Bunny CDN. Following this, you can enable permacache. So, click on storage on the left and then add a storage zone with at least one replication zone. You can select replication zones based on the location of your audience. You will not need to physically upload the files to storage since permacache will do that automatically for you. Just go to permacache from your cdn dashboard and then attach the storage zone and save the settings.
Following that enable the security features (only the ones you consider essential or you can continue with default settings).
Traffic Manager
The traffic manager allows you to redirect or block traffic from specific countries. If you want to redirect the traffic from country A to the origin server, you can do it from the traffic manager and similarly, you can block the traffic from Country B on the map in the dashboard.
Headers and Bunny Optimizer
CORS (Cross Origin resource SHaring Headers) are enabled by default in BUnny CDN. However, you can also enable the canonical headers to avoid any SEO issues.
The Bunny OPtimizer is the real deal in the Bunny CDN configuration. It is going to cost you an extra $9.5/month but it will be worth it. So, for 200 GB of monthly data transferred and with Bunny Optimizer, you will be paying less than $20. It is still quite economical to use Bunny CDN given how it can optimize your images and the other static assets. The Bunny OPtimizer will minify CSS and JS as well as optimize images on the fly and provide webP image compression. You can also use it to add watermarks to your images.
Bunny has also released Bunny AI that you can use to generate images for prompts using the engine of your choice. You can learn more about Bunny AI here.
If you want more speed, you can enable Bunny DNS and use it to speed up your DNS connection.
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Cloudfront CDN with Custom CDN Domain
Best CDN for Wordpress Websites
A few last words:
Bunny is undoubtedly among the best cdn options for your Wordpress site. You can use a cdn plugin like W3TC, cdn enabler, or WP SUper Cache to enable Bunny CDN and your CDN link to your Wordpress site. Otherwise, you can use the Bunny.net plugin for Wordpress from the Wordpress plugin repository to enable Bunny CDN on your Wordpress site.
Bunny CDN has a lot of features and you can enable most of them since they are all very useful for speeding up your Wordpress website. However, it is mainly the features like Permacache and Bunny OPtimizer that make the real difference apart from the economic pricing of Bunny’s services.
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