Table of Contents
What is a CDN?
If your server is in the US and some of your visitors are from India. The data has to travel halfway around the globe, which adds up 200-300 ms to every request.
CDN or Content Delivery Network is a network of servers spread across the globe. These servers are designed for serving static files. So if you have an image and put that into a CDN, it will be cached in all the servers. When a user requests for that file, instead of serving it from the original server, CDN provider will serve it from the nearest location to the user.
Why should I use a CDN?
without CDN 
with CDN
I hope that’s pretty clear from the screenshot.
CDN increase the speed of your website by serving static files like images, css, js from the nearest location of your server. That will reduce the load time as well you offload 95% of the work in your server to external providers. Thus your server got more resources to handle PHP and MySQL.
Here are some potential benefits of integrating a CDN:
- Faster website
- Less load to server, better performance
- Offload bandwidth costs from the origin server
- Faster crawling for search engine, hence better SEO
Managed hosting providers with CDN
Before digging deep into external CDN providers, double-check whether your hosting provider already has a built-in CDN.
Here are some of them:
Comparison of CDN providers for WordPress
| Cloudflare | BunnyCDN | KeyCDN | Jetpack | Cloudinary | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average response time | 42 ms | 43 ms | 50 ms | – | 38 ms |
| No. of pops | 155+ | 35+ | 35+ | – | 1700+ |
| Pricing | Freemium | Premium | Premium | Free | Freemium |
| Bandwidth | Free | $0.01/GB/month | $0.04/GB/month | Free | Free up to 25GB, afterwards $89/month |
| On the fly image optimization | Yes ($20/month) | Yes ($9.5/month) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Instant Purge | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | – |
| Cookie-free domain | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Extra DNS lookup | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the fastest CDN providers that powers 15% of the Internet! Unlike other CDN providers, Cloudflare works as an HTTP proxy. What this means for you is an easy setup. Just add your website to Cloudflare and you’re good to go.
BunnyCDN
BunnyCDN is a premium CDN which have a very good performance (almost equivalent to Cloudflare). BunnyCDN is also optimized for delivering large files like video.
I’m a big fan of BunnyCDN and use it in my every site instead of Cloudflare CDN.
KeyCDN
KeyCDN is another premium CDN provider. Fast, reliable and used by premium managed WordPress hosting providers like Kinsta.
Jetpack
Jetpack is from Automattic, the company behind WordPress. The main difference with other CDN providers is that Jetpack is completely free. Even with the features like image compression, WebP support etc!
However, due to the following reasons, I don’t use it:
- No purging of the cache
- Low-quality image compression
- Inconsistent response time
- Multiple domains (i0.wp.com, i1.wp.com, or i2.wp.com)
Cloudinary
Cloudinary is not just a CDN, it’s more like a Google Drive for images. They’re the pioneers in image optimization.
Cloudinary uses Akamai as the CDN under the hood, one of the best CDN providers ranked in top 3 by cdnperf.com
Conclusion
There are plenty of CDN providers out there. I’ve only selected the best in each category, with unique features based on price. Each of them of their own pros and cons. Go through each of them in detail and select the one which suits you.
Comment below if you’ve any queries or feedback. I read and reply to each of them within 8 hours!
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