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Are you looking for the best WordPress CDN service for your website?

If yes, this guide is for you.

A CDN service can speed up your site speed by serving cached static content from servers which are located near your user’s country or geographical location. In this post, I am going to show you the best WordPress CDN services and how CDN is helpful to increase the speed of your website.

What is a CDN?

CDN is also known as Content Delivery Network is a network of servers that deliver cached content from sites based on the geographical location of the users. For more information, you need to see our post about Why you need a CDN for your WordPress blog?

You need to understand that CDN is not a WordPress hosting. So you will need a WordPress hosting service in order to start your website.

How CDN speeds up WordPress?

Usually, your shared or WordPress hosting company serves you from a single geographical location. All the users of your website access the same server.

If your website gets huge traffic, then the user requests will slow your site. During the peak hours of traffic, it can also crash the server which can make your site temporarily unavailable.

Strangeloop discovered after conducting a study, a single second delay in site speed can cause 11% less page views and 7% less conversions.

This is where CDN works well. CDN caches static resources of your server like javascript, stylesheets and images.

When a user requests your website, static resources are served by CDN servers. End of the day, it reduces the load on your hosting server and loads the site faster.

Static content is served using a network of servers. The geographical location of these servers is different around the globe. Every user request is served by the closest server to the location of user. It reduces the page load speed and also makes your website faster for users of all locations.

After this discussion, let’s have a look at some of the top WordPress CDN services.

1. MaxCDN

MaxCDN is the best WordPress CDN in the market. The servers of this company have fast SSD drives and spread across data centers around the world.

It is an easy task to install and setup MaxCDN in WordPress. It works efficiently with famous WordPress caching plugins like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache.

The control panel of CDN is beginner friendly so you can manage it with ease. It enables you to view reports, purge cache and setup locations etc. MaxCDN also allows the users to add SSL certificate or use a shared SSL certificate to ensure that your cached content is served using HTTPS/SSL.

I believe that it is the most reliable, fast, and beginner friendly WordPress CDN service.

Grade: A+

Pricing: Starting from $9/month

2. Sucuri

Sucuri is a famous website of a security company. They offer a powerful CDN and WordPress firewall that protects your site against malware, DDOS attacks and other WordPress security threats.

Their website application firewall scans all user requests to your site before it reaches your hosting server. This blocks several malware, spam and DDOS attacks.

On the top, their anycast network is spread throughout the world so your users are never far away from the fastest servers. Their firewall has double benefits including security and speed.

Sucuri works with all the famous CDNs available in this list. I recommend MaxCDN on WordPress site. It reduces server load tremendously, and Sucuri’s firewall blocks all bad requests before requesting cached content from MaxCDN.

Grade: A

Pricing Starting from 9.99$/month for a single website.

3. Cloudflare

Cloudflare is also famous for their free CDN that they offer for small sites. However, keep in mind that their free plan has limited DDOS protection and does not support all the features which are available in paid plans.

It is an easy task to setup Cloudflare CDN in WordPress. Cloudflare has a large network of globally distributed servers and it can cache static content automatically.

Cloudflare offers an easy to use control panel to monitor performance and clean up cache.

They also have ‘I am under attack Mode’ feature. It shows users a security page for a few seconds while analyzing the traffic and sending them to your site.

Grade: A

Pricing: Paid plans starting from $20 per month.

4. StackPath

StackPath gives a solid CDN that is built on top growing platform. They have a larger network of servers which is spread throughout the world in many countries.

Their CDN is secure and it protects your site from DDOS attacks with load balancing and blocking features. All plans include site firewall that further reduces server load on your website and boosts the load time of page.

It is easy to setup for website owners because it has developer friendly set of tools and APIs. It enables developers to integrate their websites or apps into the StackPath API and take advantage of its powerful interface.

Grade: B+

Pricing: Starting from $20 per month.

5. KeyCDN

KeyCDN is another good option for a WordPress CDN service. It offers a powerful network of servers available in Europe, Asia, North America and pacific regions.

It is easy to setup on different platforms such as WordPress. Plans also include free and custom SSL, HTTP/2 support, DDOS mitigation, restful API support, SSD servers and powerful control panel.

KeyCDN gives pay as you go plans, it means that you pay for what you use instead of fixed amount on monthly basis. It could reduce pricing for smaller websites but unexpected growth in traffic may also increase the cost.

Grade: B

Pricing: Pay as you go starting from $0.04 per GB. Minimum $40 per year.

6. Rackspace

Rackspace is a famous name in hosting, cloud computing and enterprise level cloud solutions. It also offers a CDN solution built on top of the powerful cloud infrastructure.

Setup is a little more complicated as compared to some other CDN services. Rackspace offers several other cloud solutions as well that makes it a bit complicated for users to find their way.

It does not offer any DDOS mitigation at all. For DDOS protection, you will need to use Sucuri or Cloudflare.

Grade: C

Pricing Pay as you starting from $0.16 per GB.

7. Incapsula

Incapsula is another famous WordPress CDN solution. It has located servers around the world including a data center in South America. It is easy to setup and works well in WordPress caching and with other plugins.

Incapsula offers SSL, 24/7 support, website application firewall and DDOS mitigation as part of their paid CDN plans. It also offers free CDN plan which does not have these features.

Grade: C

Pricing: Paid plans starting from $59 per month.

Conclusion

After carefully going through all these top WordPress CDN services, one cannot deny that MaxCDN is the best WordPress CDN in the market. They offer the most comprehensive set of features at a reasonable price and the setup is also beginner friendly.

I will also suggest Sucuri because it gives access to their cloud proxy and website firewall. You can also use it with other CDNs to boost the performance of your website.

If your budget is tight, free CDN of Cloudflare will do the job for you.

I hope that you liked the post and it will help you to find the best WordPress CDN solution for your site.

Arsalan Rauf

Arsalan Rauf is an entrepreneur, freelancer, creative writer, and also a fountainhead of Green Hat Expert. Additionally, he is also an eminent researcher of Blogging, SEO, Internet Marketing, Social Media, premium accounts, codes, links, tips and tricks, etc.

www.greenhatexpert.com

I spend more time on performance and optimization of my website. After doing optimization, I have found an interesting performance improvement feature. In this post, I shall show you how to install and setup MaxCDN in WordPress.

I have done a number of test on Pingdom site. The fast load time of my homepage was just 483ms. I ran the test several times and in different hours. The load time of the site was 1.7 seconds and here is the screenshot:

There is a lot in the performance optimization (reducing HTTP queries like loading scripts only when they are required, optimizing images, combining scripts and stylesheets etc). one of the main feature that was making our site load faster that is, WordPress CDN. I was using MaxCDN and you can also read Why You Need a CDN for your WordPress blog or website. And you can also learn that What is a CDN in this guide.

If you want to follow this tutorial or guide, you need a MaxCDN account. It is affordable and worth the money. If you do not possess an account so sign up now.

After creating your account with MaxCDN, you need to install the WordPress plugin known as W3 Total Cache.

First of all, you need to create a pull zone in your MaxCDN dashboard.

You will be asked to give details for your pull zone in the next screen.

Pull Zone Name: Provide any name to this pull zone so that you can identify it in your MaxCDN panel.
Origin Server URL: Now enter the URL of your WordPress website that starts with http:// that ends with a slash / at the end.
Custom CDN Domain: enter any subdomain like cdn.greenhatexpert.com
Label: Give description for this pull zone.
Compression : You can save bandwidth by enabling compression so it is highly suggested that you check this box.

After creating it, you will see a success screen. In the green box, you will have a URL for your CDN.

On the next screen, you will see a URL like “wpb.greenhatexpert.netdna-cdn.com” copy and save this URL in a text file using notepad because you will need it later. If you visit your dashboard, you will see the zone that you have created successfully. Click on the ‘manage’ icon.

Next, you need to click on the “Settings” tab and look at the custom domains.

Your goal is to add multiple subdomains (CNAMEs), so we can improve the performance of pipelining in the browser. To do this click the edit button on custom domains and just add multiple custom domains.

After adding the custom subdomains, simply click the update button. In the compression settings, make sure that you have enabled Gzip compression. So you have configured your pull zone, take the long CDN URL which you got in previous steps which looked like this “wpb.greenhatexpert.netdna-cdn.com. you will need it to set CNAME records. I shall show you how to create CNAME record using cPanel.

Most WordPress hosting providers use cPanel. Scroll down to the domains section and click on simple DNS Zone editor.

On this page, you will have to fill out the fields to add a CNAME record.

You need to fill the required values which are: Name and CNAME.

Name:This is the name of your Custom CDN Domain. For example, my custom CDN domain is cdn.greenhatexpert.com, so I will put “cdn” in our name field.
CNAME:This will be URL provided to you by MaxCDN when you created the pull zone. For example: “wpb.greenhatexpert.netdna-cdn.com”.

Example screenshot:

Repeat this process for all the custom domains that you will add. The CNAME value will remain the same. All you have to change is the name such as ‘cdn’, ‘cdn2’ etc. Adding the CNAME method can be different if you are using a non cPanel host.

Now you have configured MaxCDN, now go ahead and integrate it with WordPress. You have to use the W3 Total Cache plugin. Install and activate the plugin.

On the general screen, when you will scroll down, you will see a CDN box. Enable CDN and select NetDNA/MaxCDN option.

Save the settings. Now go to the CDN menu in W3 Total Cache to configure MaxCDN with WordPress. This page will ask you to enter your API ID, API key and custom domain names.

You will get your API ID and Key from your MaxCDN dashboard. Go to Manage Account>API. Click on add key to create your key.

After configuring the W3 Total Cache part, you are done. You can click on the Test NetDNA button and you will be able to pass the test.

Want to improve your WordPress site speed?

Use MaxCDN for this purpose.

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