The main problem with servers is that one server cannot be located at multiple places at a time. So, why is this a problem? Let me give you an example. Say, your server is located in Asia. This will benefit your Asian visitors as they will get the best site loading speed. But, European and the US visitors will face slowdowns. Also, you must have noticed that if a sudden traffic spike occurs, your server may slow down, which will cause user frustrations. To combat all these, we use something known as a CDN.
A CDN ensures that your website will load faster regardless of your user location. It will also lift off a huge load from your server and will protect you from traffic spikes. In this post, I will take a look at the best free and premium CDNs for WordPress and will also help you decide the best one for your use case.
1) Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the best known CDN and web security company. Their network has a capacity of over 67Tbps and they have servers in over 100 countries and 200 cities.
In addition to providing a CDN, they provide DDoS protection, protection from common threats and a WAF. You will also find many performance optimizing features such as image compression, image resizing etc.
Cloudflare has 4 plans – Free, Pro, Business, and Enterprise (this one has custom pricing). Most of the WordPress users go with the free plan as it has a lot of value. But, the pro plan (which is a $20/month upgrade) gives you access to many more features such as WAF, Bot Fight mode, Image compression, etc. Also, on every plan, there is no bandwidth cap.
2) StackPath
StackPath was previously known as SecureCDN. They bought MaxCDN back in 2016. The integrated entity was named StackPath. StackPath is a well-known CDN company in the enterprise world. They are trusted by millions of users. StackPath offers a CDN and enterprise-grade WAF.
They have over 35 PoPs and they continuously add new locations every year.
Their CDN-only plan starts at $25/month and gets you DDoS protection and 1TB Bandwidth. Their WAF costs $50/month. StackPath has recently increased their prices and if one wants to have CDN+WAF, they then will have to shell out $75/month. Previously, their CDN-only plan started at $10/month and WAF used to cost $10/month. Considering their current pricing, StackPath is not a great deal. Cloudflare’s Pro plan fares much better with much more PoPs and many more features. It also costs less – only $20/month.
3) Amazon Cloudfront
Amazon Cloudfront is a part of AWS – Amazon Web Services. AWS is the cloud computing platform of Amazon. As Amazon is a huge company, they also have a lot of big customers, notably – Hulu, Vedantu, Slack, etc. Cloudfront has over 120 PoPs in every continent.
Amazon Cloudfront pricing structure is a little different. They charge different amount per GB depending on the location. Also, bulk discount is provided by them. They also charge per 10,000 HTTP/HTTPS request based on the location of the requests.
To get a rough estimate of your monthly costs, you can use Amazon’s Monthly Bandwidth Calculator.
4) CDN77
CDN77 is mostly known for helping NASA and other space agencies serve huge pictures from their telescopes, etc. around the globe – fast. So, it won’t be any problem for it to serve your site. They have multiple datacenters in six continents and their dashboard is nice, clean and easy to use.
Some of the notable features of CDN77 are – HTTP/2 support, Brotli compression, QUIC support, Firewall with OWASP rules included and more.
Their pricing starts at $199 for 6TB of bandwidth. This may be expensive for some of the site-owners. That’s why, I would recommend one to go with Cloudflare as they have unlimited bandwidth in all of their plans.
5) Jetpack CDN
Jetpack CDN is provided by Jetpack.com via the Jetpack plugin. It’s totally free to use and it also compresses, resizes and converts images to webp! It also delivers js and css files, although, for now, only the WordPress core js/css files are being delivered by Jetpack CDN.
They provide unlimited bandwidth and is totally free to use. But, one huge con is that they flush their CDN cache every 30 days. So, if you are having cache issues due to their CDN, you can contact support (which is slow in the free plan) and ask them to flush the cache for you. Alternatively, you can wait for 30 days to pass.
Jetpack CDN is mostly by WordPress users who are just starting out. It’s a great starting point but, as they grow, they should switch to the alternative options that I have provided in this post.
I really hope that this post has helped you to select a CDN for your needs. If you have any queries or suggestions, then please let me know in the comments down below.
