10 Best WordPress CDN Services for Faster Performance
Are you looking for a WordPress CDN (Content Delivery Network) for your website? Or have you tried some already and are still looking for better options?
If either is the case, you just landed on the perfect article. In this post, I will explain why you’d need a CDN for your WordPress blog or website — followed by the best WordPress CDN services available now, free and paid.
Before everything, let’s first understand what a CDN is and why is it important.
Table of Contents
What is a Content Delivery Network or CDN?
Essentially, CDNs are networks of servers that are used to store multiple copies of your website, specifically your images, CSS and JavaScript files.
By having a copy of your website cached on the CDN server, it will allow for a faster download by your visitors. Plus, because there are multiple copies on multiple server locations around the world, CDNs also have the advantage of being able to serve up your website content from a server within a closer proximate to your end-user.
Normally, if you use a general WordPress hosting, your website is only stored in one location; but with a CDN you now have multiple locations. There are, however, some hosting services that offer CDN inbuilt, so that you don’t have to pay extra for WordPress CDN services.
Most of these hosting services that I was telling you about actually integrate Cloudflare to their hosting — the best WordPress CDN available on the Internet.
Other popular CDN services include WordPress.com CDN (also known as Jetpack CDN), MaxCDN/Stackpath, KeyCDN, Bunny.Net and more. I have listed these and more in the next to the next section.
Let’s answer whether or not CDNs are worth investing.
Do I need a CDN?
CDNs cost from $0 per month to hundreds of dollars per month. But are those worth the cost and setup? Do you really need a CDN?
Well, the short answer is Yes. I use it (BunnyCDN), and so should you if you want to maximize your website’s potential.
CDNs not only help you with speed but also in retaining your customers by offering them a blazing fast user experience.
But requiring a CDN depends totally on your needs, especially these 4 needs:
- Visitor count
- Visitor locations
- Hosting Configurations
- Earnings
#1. Visitor Count
If your site doesn’t receive too much traffic, there is no need to go up to set up CDN. However, ensure your website doesn’t load slowly for the end-user (visitor). You can use a cache plugin for this and you are all done.
If the other 3 cases (visitor locations, hosting configuration and earnings) apply, you can go for a CDN like Bunny.net, which is around $1 per month or Cloudflare, which is free to begin with some caveats.
I will explain how these two work together and why I recommended only these two.
#2. Visitor Locations
The most important feature of a CDN is to load static assets from a server closest to the visitor. If your visitors are mostly from one country (like India) or even one region (like South Asia) — you can host your website on an Indian WordPress Hosting service that has a data center/hosting server in India.
#3. Hosting Configurations
Some web hosts are very slow. I mean, I have seen hosting services that are living in Stone Age with PHP5.4, 128MB RAM and single-core shared servers. If your website is hosted on such a web host, you can either switch to a better host or use a CDN (in case you paid in advance to your hosting). Even if you have a faster host and conditions #1 and #2 diversify; and #4 applies — you should get a CDN ASAP.
#4. Earnings
If you are earning with your website by using e-commerce or Google Adsense or Ezoic or any other sales network — you must consider switching to a CDN. Having a CDN will drastically improve your site performance and increase your aggregate revenue on a longer timescale.
So, as you can see. It depends on your needs that a CDN is required for you or not. In addition to these, if you run a website that is image-heavy (like a social network), CDN is a must ignore all 4 criteria listed above.
Best WordPress CDN Services
Here are the best WordPress CDN services as suggested and written by my editorial team.
Bunny CDN
Bunny CDN or bunny.net is one of the best premium WordPress CDNs and I use it on gauravtiwari.org for a number of reasons.
Bunny CDN is very affordable, fast and can be easily integrated with WordPress using its own plugin or WP Rocket.
Above all, it is totally beginner-friendly and I was able to move my site on this CDN in less than 5 minutes. Bunny allows you to do everything a CDN must, like purge cache, set up locations, view metrics and many more.
It has 54 PoP locations across the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia and runs on an 80 Tbps+ network.
Features:
- From $1/month
- No Hidden Fees
- Perma-Caching
- Free SSL Certificate
- Connect directly to your users with over 3000 ISPs and 14 Tier 1 transit providers. Anywhere.
- Optimize delivery and reduce latency with top-of-the-line AMD and NVMe hardware.
- Stay safe and focused with a built-in next-generation DDoS protection that just works.
Price: Starts at $1/month
Cloudflare CDN
Cloudflare is a free CDN that will help speed up your WordPress site’s loading time. For WordPress, it has launched APO (Automatic Platform Optimization), a premium addon that helps you load your WordPress sites even faster.
Cloudflare automatically caches your website and purges it when you update images or text on the site. It also allows you to see performance metrics and stats such as the total number of visitors on your site, the number of attacks it had prevented, the bandwidth you saved, and many others.
Price: Free to Start
Rocket CDN
Rocket CDN is a content delivery network developed by the team behind WP Rocket. Totally dedicated to being an exclusive WordPress CDN service – Rocket CDN can be activated by a click of a button if you are already using WP Rocket. It comes with a standalone plugin as well.
Rocket CDN is priced at a flat $8.99 per month or $89.99 per year with literally unlimited bandwidth and caching. This is the cheapest a good CDN like this can go.
Price: $8.99 per month
Stackpath or MaxCDN
Stackpath (formerly MaxCDN) is a popular name and a performance-based platform that offers a rock-solid CDN. Stackpath/MaxCDN is a very user-friendly CDN that offers lightning-fast servers that assure to deliver content in 20ms. It has many PoPs around the globe and provides the best security options along with performance. Its plans include DDoS protection, 1TB per month bandwidth, real-time analytics and much more.
Price: Depends.
Jetpack / WordPress.com CDN
Jetpack is a fantastic WordPress plugin that offers several speed functionalities, security and backup and Jetpack Site Accelerator is one of these. Jetpack Site Accelerator is now popularly known as Jetpack CDN and optimizes images and serves common JS and CSS files from its network of global server locations.
If you are on WordPress.com Business hosting, even Jetpack CDN’s premium features are free.
Price: Free
Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon CloudFront is the world’s most used CDN service that may require a little setup but is really cheap. It securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment.
Amazon CloudFront network has over 200 servers worldwide and will make your experience seamless and super fast. It ensures that your static content is delivered quickly to end-user, even if they are sitting in the other part of the world.
You must sign up for an AWS account for using this plugin, and then you can use this and manage CloudFront activation. There is an AWS free tier, to begin with, which includes 50GB free bandwidth.
Price: Free to start
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is an outstanding CDN with powerful servers across Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific. Its plans include DDOS mitigation, Restful API support, SSD servers and many more. This CDN offers go plans instead of fixed payments. This means you pay only for what you use. This could also increase costs in case of sudden traffic growth.
Price: Starts from $0.04 per GB.
Rackspace
Rackspace is an old and well-known brand in cloud computing and providing enterprise-level cloud solutions. It is a bit complicated CDN as compared to other CDNs available. It gives you a CDN solution built on top of robust cloud infrastructure. It offers many cloud solutions, which make it complicated but works well with popular WordPress plugins. However, it doesn’t provide any DDoS migration, which is a drawback for this CDN.
Price: Starts at $0.16 per GB
Imperva Secure CDN
Imperva offers a popular WordPress CDN solution that has its servers placed across the globe very strategically. This is an easy-to-use CDN that offers a firewall, SSL and DDoS protection in its paid program. It works well with other WordPress plugins and also has a free CDN that doesn’t include these features.
Price: Depends.
Sucuri
Sucuri is one of the most popular security companies in the world. They offer a powerful WordPress firewall that scans all the users before they reach your site, which helps in preventing many DDoS attacks. Its network is spread all across the globe, so your users are never far away from the server, thus speeding up your site. Hence the firewall gives you double benefits – protection and as well as speed.
Price: Starts from $9.99 per month
That’s all for now. I will keep updating this page with more updated information.
Disclaimer: My content is reader-supported, meaning that if you click on some of the links in my posts and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. These affiliate links help me keep the content on gauravtiwari.org free and full of valuable insights. I only recommend products and services that I trust and believe will genuinely benefit you. Your support through these links is greatly appreciated—it helps me continue to create helpful content and resources for you. Thank you! ~ Gaurav Tiwari