Well, having a high website load time can hurt the search engine rankings. Yes, this is true! Google considers the website load time as one of its 200 factors to rank a website.
If your blog or WordPress site is struggling to get search engine traffic, open tools like Pingdom or GT Metrix and test its page load time.
Google is a website, and its engineers make sure that Google provides excellent user experience to its users. Thus, it will never show your web page in the top 10/20 search results if your website has poor navigation or high loading time.
If you’ve tried your luck with WordPress plugins to optimize the performance and if you’ve not experienced any noticeable improvements, you should start using a CDN service.
What is a CDN?
Well, CDN is an acronym for content delivery network, a technology developed to improve website load time.
How CDN works?
CDN providers for WordPress and other platforms maintains a cache of the most valuable resources of your website like images, static HTML, etc. They’ve set up data centers in various parts of the world and the cached resources are distributed on several servers.
For example, XYZ CDN provider for WordPress and other platforms may have one data center in India, other in Australia, United States, etc.
The reason for this is that when a user residing in the same region where the data center is located requests a web page, the resources that were cached at the data center’s server nearest to the user that requested the web page would send the requested cached page instead of the service that hosts the website. Thus, your site load time will improve dramatically.
By this time, you may have made up your mind to sign up for a CDN provider for a website or any other platform. But the big question that might be haunting your mind is which is the best CDN provider for WordPress or any other platform (Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc)? This question has been answered below –
Best CDN providers for WordPress
JetPack Photon
The WP JetPack plugin allows users to turn on the Photon CDN service on their sites. JetPack CDN caches images and improves your website loading time.
The CDN service is free and it saves your bandwidth. When you enable it on your site, JetPack will automatically replace the image URLs with their CDN version.
KeyCDN
KeyCDN saves the cached files on SSDs. It supports HTTP 2.0 protocol. KeyCDN DNS service is provided by AnyCast. It has 25 DataCenters located in various parts of the world.
KeyCDN allows users to test drive its CDN for free. It enables users to enable Free SSL and purge cached files with a single click.
KeyCDN lets you enable hotlink protection and it protects your site from DDOS attacks. You can configure KeyCDN to block bad bots from crawling your website.
KC supports various platforms. To make CDN integration easy for the users, KeyCDN provides detailed tutorials on its website.
MaxCDN
MaxCDN is one of the best CDN providers for WordPress based websites. It has cheap plans and supports monthly as well as annual payment. The CDN provider offers 24 x 7 support.
Configuring your website to use MAXCDN service is easy. MaxCDN allows users to see real-time traffic data of a website. It has an option to purge CDN cache. It also maintains data of your website visitors.
MaxCDN enables you to whitelist IP addresses. It supports instant, SNI, and shared SSL certificates. It lets you activate 2 step authentication. MaxCDN makes users aware of website hijacking attacks. It also protects your site from DDOS attacks.
Amazon CloudFront
Yet another Cheap CDN service, Amazon Content Delivery Network service has positive feedback from critics as well as the users.
Cloudfront is free to use until your website traffic reaches up to a certain level. The Amazon CDN is used by some of the top websites. It powers 4+ million websites. It has a great infrastructure and excellent plans for small as well as large website owners.
CloudFront supports dynamic and static websites. It has the option to enable or disable logging. CF can accelerate the speed of your website considerably.
CloudFlare network
CloudFlare has the fastest DNS servers in the world. It has many data centers.
CloudFlare offers paid as well as free CDN services. Configuring your site to use Cloudflare service is not a rocket science. CloudFlare analyzes your site’s zone records and recommends some changes. You must log in to your domain registration service provider’s account and change the DNS settings.
CloudFlare offers several tools that include analytic, caching, security, etc. Its DNS infrastructure averts DDOS threats. CloudFlare DNS service is used by many top website hosting firms.
CloudFlare is one of the most powerful and fastest CDN services in the world.
JetPack, MaxCDN, KeyCDN, Amazon CloudFront, and CloudFlare are the best CDN
A Nice Article about CDN’s.
Looking for a CDN now for my website and would definitely love to try MAX CDN.
Will tell you the results about it soon.
Thanks for sharing information I’m also searching the same to improve loading time of my blog.
Yes Roland !
You should definitely try out MaxCDN .. it will make your website faster !
Hi Pramod,
I started using cloudflare since some months and i’m happy with my website performance!
thanks for sharing!
Hello Pramod,
This is indeed a nice review on the three best cdn network.
When i started having issues with my blog, i was advised by my friend to use maxcdn but arvixe (My host) recommended the cloud flare cdn. I tried it, and ever since then, i have been using it with rest of mind 🙂
Thanks and do have a great weekend my friend
Hi Pramod
I have heard some great things about Max CDN, but am not ready to spend the money on it yet.
Of course it would make serving my website faster, but I don’t really have the income or visitors to justify it.
Thanks for the info though
ashley