Best WordPress CDN Services in 2018
Are you looking for the best WordPress CDN service for your website? A CDN service speeds up your website speed by serving cached static content from servers located near your user’s geographic location.
What is a CDN?
CDN is short for Content Delivery Network which is a network of servers that deliver cached static content from websites to users based on the geographic location of the user.
How CDN speeds up WordPress?
Normally, your WordPress hosting company serves your website from a single location. All your website visitors access the same server.
If you have a high traffic website, then all those user requests will slow down your website. During peak traffic hours, it can even crash the server which will make your site temporarily unavailable.
A study conducted by Strangeloop discovered, that a single second delay in website speed causes 11% less page views and 7% less conversions.
This is where CDN comes in. CDN caches your server’s static resources like stylesheets, javascript, and images.
When a user requests your website, all static resources are served through CDN servers. This reduces the load on your hosting server and makes it faster and more efficient.
Static content is served through a network of servers located in different geographical locations around the globe. Each user request is handled by a server closest to the user’s location. This reduces the page load speed, and your website becomes noticeably faster for all users.
That being said, let’s take a look at some of top WordPress CDN services, and how they stack up against each other.
1.MaxCDN
MaxCDN s the best WordPress CDN in the market. Their servers are equipped with fast SSD drives and spread across data centers around the world.
It is super easy to install and setup MaxCDN in WordPress. it works beautifully with popular WordPress caching plugins like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache.
You can manage your CDN with a beginner friendly control panel. It allows you to purge cache, view reports, setup locations, and more. MaxCDN also allows you to add SSL certificate or use a shared SSL certificate to make sure that your cached content is served through SSL/HTTPS.
It is the most reliable, fast, and beginner friendly WordPress CDN service.
Grade: A+
Pricing: Starting from $9/month
2.Sucuri
Sucuri is a popular website security company. they offer a powerful WordPress firewall and CDN,which protects your website against DDOS attacks,malware, and other WordPress Security threats.
Their website application firewall scans all user requests to your website before it reaches your hosting server. This blocks many spam, malware, and DDOS attacks.
On top of that, their anycast network is spread across the globe so your users are never far away from the fastest servers. Their firewall has double benefits: speed and security.
This reduces server load tremendously, as Sucuri firewall blocks all bad requests before requesting cached content from MaxCDN
Grade: A
Pricing: Starting from $9.99 per month for a single website.
3.Cloudflare
It is easy to setup Cloudflare CDN in WordPress. It has a large network of globally distributed servers and it automatically caches static content.Cloudfare has an easy to use control panel to clean up cache and monitor performance.
They also have an ‘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 website.
Grade: A
Pricing: Paid plans starting from $20 per month.
4.StackPath
StackPath offers a rock solid CDN built on top of steadily growing platform. They have a larger network of servers spread across many countries around the globe.
Their secure CDN protects your website from DDoS attacks with load balancing and blocking features. All plans include website firewall which further reduces server load on your website and boosts page load time.
It is easy to setup for website owners and comes with a developer friendly set of tools and APIs. This allows developers to integrate their apps or websites 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. They offer a powerful network of servers spread across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions.
It is easy to setup on many popular platforms including WordPress. Plans also include DDoS mitigation, free and custom SSL, HTTP/2 support, Restful API support, SSD servers, and powerful control panel.
KeyCDN offers pay as you go plans, which means you pay for what you use instead of a fixed monthly payment. This could reduce pricing for smaller websites, but unexpected growth in traffic may also increase costs.
Grade: B
Pricing: Pay as you go starting from $0.04 per GB. Minimum $40 per year.
Conclusion
After carefully evaluating all these top WordPress CDN services, one thing was clear that MaxCDN is the best WordPress CDN in the market. They offer the most comprehensive set of features, at a reasonable pricing, and beginner friendly setup.
We would also recommend Sucuri,because it gets you access to their website firewall and cloud proxy. You can also use Sucuri with other CDNs to further boost your website performance.
If you are tight on budget, then Cloudflare’s free CDN plan can do the job.
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress CDN solution for your website.