[ad_1] Speed is a practical necessity for all websites. While there are lots of ways you can do this, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) is ideal for getting your site to load fast regardless of where the end user is located. Though, as this list of free and premium CDNs will show, there’s overwhelming choice. Though, you don’t have to bog yourself down with decision paralysis. There are a few top solutions to suit a variety of needs. What’s more, because WordPress is popular, integrating a CDN is a piece of cake. This means you can concentrate on what a solution will offer, rather than how you’ll implement it. As such, this article will look at some of the popular free and premium CDNs for WordPress. Before this, let’s fill in the blanks when it comes to how a CDN can help you. What a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Is In a nutshell, a CDN is a network of servers across the globe. The goal is to take your site, distribute it across those servers, and call on it when a local user accesses your site. For example, if you’re a site owner in the US, you’re often going to use a server located in the country. Users close in a relative sense to that server won’t see any issues. Though, for an end user in Australia, the time it takes to get your site from one server to the other will cause lag. In fact, this is a big aspect in testing your site speed with tools such as Pingdom or GTmetrix: A CDN chooses the most relevant server (read: the closest) for the end user, and serves that. It’s the same site for all practical purposes, but offers a dramatic difference to your visitors. As such, they’re vital for a high-performing website that runs fast almost anywhere on the planet. The Perks of Both Free and Premium CDNs for Your Site and Its Users The general benefit of using free or premium CDNs is speed. Though, if you drill down further, there are specific reasons why a fast site is better than a slow one: In short, search engines prefer fast sites. Google considers speed to be an important factor, and uses it in part to determine a site’s PageRank calculation. A site that loads quickly improves the user’s experience, which is crucial for optimizing conversion rates. After all, even a two-second loading time can hammer your bounce rate. There’s also a bandwidth saving for your host too. Because a CDN uses its own servers, your host won’t be responsible for allocating resources. As such, you can better use your host’s resources, and farm out others to your CDN. 10 Top Free and Premium CDNs for WordPress Over the next few sections, we’ll discuss ten of the best free and premium CDNs on the market. We’ll talk about the general features of each solution, along with their pros and cons. Of course, we’ll also tell you the cost of each one. Here’s a summary of our inclusions: StackPath. An enterprise-level solution that comes with similar-sized pricing. Amazon CloudFront. It integrates with AWS, so will be suitable if you use that service. CDN77. This is the only CDN that can work from space! It’s another service that best suits huge networks. Cloudflare. The perennial choice of users with low budgets, Cloudflare is great regardless of whether you’re on the free or premium tier. CDN.net. The pricing is better than other large CDNs, but offers less in the way of features and functionality. jsDelivr. This servers your JavaScript dependencies from a network of servers. Site Accelerator. Automattic’s own solution is an image and file CDN that’s ideal if you’re a Jetpack user. KeyCDN. Good pricing and solid features means KeyCDN is a top-tier solution for all users. Swarmify. A video CDN that works great alongside other full-featured CDNs. BelugaCDN. This budget CDN is an outlier pic if you’re looking for a long-term and cheap CDN. While you might have heard of some solutions here, others could be new. As such, we encourage you to jump around the post and check out whatever CDNs appeal to you. Let’s begin! 1. StackPath First on our list of free and premium CDNs is a solution you may not know in its current guise. StackPath is a rebranded and enhanced MaxCDN – a product we’ve covered on the blog before. Regardless of its name, it’s an industry-standard CDN, trusted by millions of users. StackPath offers high-performance and better security, along with a bunch of other features and specifications: A direct connection to the StackPath network – great for high-traffic applications. The ability to serve Secure Sockets Layers (SSL) certificates from StackPath’s servers, rather than from your ‘origins’. You’re able to set custom rules for your setup, to make sure StackPath works for your needs. StackPath also offers in-depth support across a variety of channels. In the past, we’ve shown how MaxCDN and WordPress integrates, and it will be a similar case for StackPath too. Though, it’s worth noting that we couldn’t find any pricing on StackPath’s website. This often indicates that you’ll need a substantial budget to afford its service. As such, this could be a deal-breaker for you. Try StackPath 2. Amazon CloudFront Amazon (of course) are an integral part of online shopping for millions of users. What’s more, there are various ‘wings’ of the brand, and you can find services such as audiobooks, and cloud computing too. Amazon’s CloudFront is their take on a CDN that’s worth investigating. CloudFront is one part of the whole Amazon Web Services (AWS) offering. As such, your AWS resource allocation includes millions of ‘function invocations’ for the platform. As you’d expect, you’re in good hands with CloudFront. Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Slack, and more all use the CDN to deliver content across the globe. This is down to a robust, enterprise-level set of features and functionality: There’s deep integration with the whole AWS network of
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